The new year is upon us, and with it the inevitable blizzard of 2019 marketing predictions. Helpful as they are, does anyone ever go back to see how accurate the 2018 predictions were?
We do. I sifted through about 25 “2018 prediction” articles, and these five struck me as being both the most accurate and most useful.
- Social Media Today, 12 Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2018. Published Dec. 12, 2017. Written by Isabella Andersen. Spotting the development of non-traditional TV advertising on platforms such as Hulu was a great call. All of the other 11 were on the money or very close.
- ClickZ, Six B2B content marketing predictions for 2018. Published Jan. 18, 2018. Written by Sam Lawson, Head of ClickZ. The analysis of artificial intelligence-generated content was interesting; indeed, a lot of progress took place in this area even though it may not be on the radar of many midsize organizations yet. Also, good to see a mention of another underappreciated but massively important marketing development: blockchain.
- Business 2 Community, The Top 18 Marketing Predictions for 2018, According to the Experts. Published Dec. 12, 2017. Compiled by Denise Chan, Content Marketing Manager at Bitly. Lots of good calls here, including:
- Ashley Johnson, Founder & CEO of Mouth Marketing, nailed the explosion in LinkedIn marketing.
- Kean Graham, CEO of MonetizeMore, made note of what turned out to be a major story in 2018, false advertising laws and issues of online advertising privacy and legitimacy.
- Ahmed Khalifa, Founder & Director of IgniteRock, explored voice search, which indeed got a lot of attention.
- Doug Fowler, President of Waypost Marketing, talked about chatbots and balancing automation with a human touch. Definitely a big issue; 2018 saw chatbots cropping up everywhere.
- Campaign Monitor, 2018 Email Marketing Predictions. These predictions, like the ones above, came from outside sources as well as from Samantha Anderl of Campaign Monitor. Alex Williams, Creative Director at Trendline Interactive, noted the rapid development of email personalization technology. But this is just one example among many deep and thought-provoking observations in this technically oriented article.
- Neil Patel, 8 Surprising Marketing Predictions for 2018. Patel also predicts the rise of chatbots. His discussion of voice search and IoT technology was important; a lot of development in these areas occurred throughout 2018, at least on the technical side. Also, his readers would have been wise to reflect on his observations of the challenges of social media advertising and participation.
I’ll definitely be looking to these sources for 2019 marketing predictions. Where will you be looking?