Trends and challenges of digital marketing in 2017!

A report on global advertising trends in 2016 by market research firm IHS Markit pointed out that last year, global advertising revenue will grow by 7.1% to US$532 billion. Unlike the global market, in China, online advertising revenue is 17% higher than television advertising revenue, with a difference of approximately US$15 billion. China is the only country in the world where the share of online advertising significantly exceeds that of television advertising. China's significant lead in online advertising is due to the flourishing of communication channels in the mobile Internet era. In addition, the domestic television media has been in a state of decline in recent years. Online advertising has undoubtedly become the most mainstream form of advertising in the country.

On the other hand, the excessive growth of online advertising has also brought about certain negative effects. The conversion rate of advertisements is declining significantly. Several research reports that have evaluated the effectiveness of advertisements have pointed out that there is a gap between the click-through rate and conversion rate of online advertisements and those of television, radio and other channels. We can also see from Tencent's several quarterly financial reports in 2016 that the growth rate of online advertising has begun to decline significantly, which also indirectly highlights the industry's concerns about the lower conversion rate of online advertising.

Data just released by CNNIC shows that the current size of China's Internet users has reached 731 million, equivalent to the total population of Europe. This means that from a marketing perspective, digital marketing remains the undisputed number one channel. At the same time, the increase in the number of audiences has also put forward higher requirements for innovation in content and form of digital marketing. In 2016, phenomenal cases of digital marketing such as Durex's live show, Xin Shi Xiang's escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, YSL lipstick's screen-sweeping marketing, and Papi Jiang's first advertisement have great enlightenment significance for the marketing industry. Not only can we discover problems from them, but also get a glimpse of potential trends in 2017.

The “disappearing” traffic dividend

Research firm eMarketer once pointed out in a report that one of the problems that many advertisers are worried about is that it is difficult for advertisements with heavy investments to obtain the expected value. Today, only 4 out of every 10,000 people will click on advertisements delivered through digital channels, while in 1994, only 44 out of every 100 people would click on banner ads on the Internet. Along with the problem of declining click-through rates, the cost of advertising has increased significantly. The negative correlation between the increasing investment in digital marketing and the level of attention reflects that the traffic dividend in the Internet era is gradually disappearing.

With the popularization of mobile Internet , the emergence of various communication forms and media forms is inevitably a bit dazzling. The increase in Internet portals has caused users to become more dispersed. It is no longer possible for an advertisement placed on a mainstream website to be seen by the vast majority of people ten years ago. The numerous apps on mobile devices alone have made the audience sufficiently fragmented, making it difficult for the attention economy to achieve good results. This has also made digital marketing more difficult. Marketing is experiencing a dual choice between content and channels.

However, the sudden rise of online advertising is precisely due to its own traffic dividend, a large number of users and convenient communication channels, which not only reflects the improvement in marketing effectiveness, but also rapidly accelerates the speed between marketing and monetization. However, with the exponential growth of information, the Internet began to produce an information explosion, and the traffic dividend began to undermine the communication effect. The emergence of mobile Internet further exacerbated this situation. As mentioned above, faced with the negative impact of information explosion, advertisers have to make a choice between content and channels. Winning with content or choosing more appropriate channels is the key to the success or failure of digital marketing.

The sudden rise of the live broadcast + marketing model in 2016 provided a more appropriate answer. Although the traffic dividend is disappearing, there is still considerable traffic and dissemination effect for new things, or new Internet portals. At the beginning of the year, Durex seized the traffic dividend of the first year of live streaming and planned a live show of its own products in April. The slightly sexually suggestive gimmick and the fresh format of live streaming allowed Durex to gain an advantage in content and channels, and the effect is self-evident. Since then, everyone from international brands like Casio, KFC, and Budweiser to internet celebrities and their clothing brands have entered the live streaming platform and tried their hand at content marketing through this traffic entrance.

It is not difficult to see that the appeal of live streaming platforms in marketing lies in the fact that, as content output platforms, they not only have natural channel advantages, but also have greater freedom in content, are relatively flexible in space and time, and their audiences include mainstream young groups, which is why they have achieved good results.

The so-called decline of traffic dividend does not actually mean a decline in the absolute amount of traffic. On the contrary, this amount is still increasing. Rather, it means that in more "traditional" channels, the attention paid to a single thing has declined due to the massive increase in the number of users, including some emerging channels in the past two years. Only by grasping the most cutting-edge communication channels at present can we make full use of the traffic advantages that were easily obtained in the past. A major trend in digital marketing in 2017 is to find new traffic entrances and continuously abandon "traditional" channels.

Social networks are more about how to make a name for yourself

The fading of traffic dividends has put digital marketing in a dilemma in terms of communication effectiveness. Faced with an ever-increasing potential audience, the effectiveness of communication is constantly being discounted. This decline is particularly evident on social networks, which have been the main battlefield of digital marketing in recent years.

There are many reasons for the decline in social networks. First of all, with the diversification of social methods, the concept of social networks has become more general, and there have been many differentiations in form, so the effects naturally cannot be generalized. Secondly, due to the continuous immersion in the Internet, the demand for personalization is becoming stronger and stronger, which means that there are more and more social circles and the demands are becoming more and more scattered. How to achieve better communication effects on social networks that are more dispersed and have more distinct individual characteristics is a difficult problem that digital marketing focuses on.

Judging from several sensational marketing events in 2016, marketing on social networks has begun to shift from selling products to earning publicity. Papi Jiang's sudden success in 2016 brought her an opportunity to hold a bidding meeting for advertising patches, and she successfully earned 22 million yuan. The tens of millions of dollars in revenue are built on the basis of nearly a hundred episodes of original short video content. These contents have brought emotional resonance to readers time and time again, and finally caused a sensation after a certain period of accumulation.

The two events planned by Xin Shixiang in 2016, namely, the escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and the book-throwing campaign, also received a high level of participation and made its WeChat public account and brand known to more people. These two events, rather than having appropriate content, resonated with people in terms of the release of "emotions". Whether it is escaping the "petty-bourgeois anxiety" of consumption in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, or the "hypocritical political correctness" of the book-throwing campaign, it has indeed resonated with a certain group of people, and it happens that this group of people is the main force speaking out on the Internet.

The success of these cases means that traditional social marketing ideas may be undergoing changes. The possibility of viral spread that was pursued in the past, which was ignited by a single touch and forwarded blindly, is becoming extremely slim. Several successful event marketing campaigns in 2016 all brought about a sense of identity in terms of content, or created an emotional resonance, and based on this, gradually moved on to the next stage.

Competition among multiple social networks, including Weibo, WeChat, and even mobile live streaming platforms, has also caused marketers to focus not on promoting products, but on how to gain wider attention on social networks, that is, how to make efforts to attract attention. Digital marketing does not mean that the results will be immediately converted into profits. As long as you get more attention, you are halfway to success. It is foreseeable that in 2017, we will see more various events on Weibo and WeChat Moments. There may be a unified planning behind this, and brands and products hidden behind the popularity.

Personalization, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

Sophisticated planning and selection of communication channels are important aspects that must be considered in digital marketing strategy formulation today. But to ensure the success rate, technical support is particularly important.

As mentioned above, in the era of personalization, users' needs are not the same. It is obviously impossible to influence a large group through fixed or single channels. Realizing accurate push based on user behavior analysis is the direction that digital marketing has been working towards in recent years. This requires the support of big data and advanced technologies. Big data is no longer a new topic, but analysis based on user behavior requires the support of massive data such as LBS, travel, consumption, search, and clicks. From this perspective, the role of Internet portals is once again highlighted, and the advantages of channels are more obvious. For digital marketing, it is a clear direction to improve communication effectiveness.

With the diversification of mobile Internet, vertical fields are clearly segmented, and digital marketing also urgently needs to improve the professionalism of its delivery. According to product needs, marketing efforts should be concentrated on specific vertical fields, and customized solutions for media, data, and delivery models should be designed according to the characteristics of the field. In addition, the secondary use of data is also a potential trend. Many Internet companies have shifted their data applications from data analysis to data mining and trend measurement. Through the secondary use of data, they can predict audience behavior and provide directional guidance for digital marketing.

So what role does artificial intelligence play in this? If data is a neural network that connects all analyses based on consumer behavior and needs, then artificial intelligence is the brain center that recommends appropriate content to the most suitable groups and enables interaction on this basis. Competition in the digital marketing industry has gone beyond competition in service professionalism, and competition for intelligent technology has become increasingly fierce. In the era of intelligence, future advertising platforms will focus more on building and optimizing product matrices such as DSP and DMP, and provide technical support for programmatic buying, continuing to improve the efficiency and accuracy of advertising delivery .

In addition, judging from the current marketing trends, if it is effortless for some Internet companies to obtain the audience's online consumption behavior data, then the vast offline market is still a blue ocean that has yet to be developed. From the current perspective, although the O2O layout war in 2015 has been quiet in 2016, it still has great significance. In 2017, digital marketing will pay more attention to the integration of online and offline channels, so that the Internet and the real economy are no longer completely disconnected. In this context, the mastery of offline channels plays a decisive role in marketing effectiveness.

In general, digital marketing in 2017 is facing more complex requirements from the perspectives of content and channels, technology and data. Creating topical events no longer relies solely on low-quality hype. The support of technology behind it, the choice of target audiences, the coverage of communication channels, and the evaluation of communication effects and secondary feedback all play a vital role. According to research institutions' forecasts, China's Internet advertising share will exceed 50% of the total advertising market for the first time in 2017. This is both an opportunity and a challenge for digital marketing.

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Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

This article was compiled and published by @邵鲁文 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!