At Bubbles our clients run global businesses. Their companies vary enormously, but they have a shared need to communicate with new audiences in all corners of the world.
To achieve this, nearly all of them call upon digital marketing. What else offers such a flexible, immediate, targeted and measurable means of communication? Our language translation services play a key role in ensuring the message they send is consistent and accurate.
But how about the strategies that get those messages out there? For that you need to keep an eye on the ever changing realm of digital marketing. As technology improves and consumer habits shift, we’re seeing a wealth of exciting developments. Savvy brands that want to stay ahead of the curve are well advised to stay on top of these developments.
Here’s a quick look at a few of the areas where we’re hearing of exciting digital marketing trends evolving in 2018.
Bigger, better … smarter data?
As data gets ever more complex (and consumers get ever more immune to marketing campaigns) we can expect digital marketing to get ever smarter over the course of the year.
We’re already seeing this trend grow in prominence – with companies like Google and Facebook assembling complex data on users’ search, interest and purchase habits. Marketers can now see not only what demographics are viewing their content, but also what other interests their audiences have.
From what we’re hearing, this trend is only likely to expand with more and more detailed information becoming available with which marketers can target their messages and the channels they’re using to disseminate their messages.
Alongside all this, of course, are the GDPR regulations, which if you ask us, will be industry-defining. The regulations, which already exist but will be strictly enforced from May 2018, demand that businesses and organisations take better care of consumer data in terms of collection, processing and storage.
GDPR means that it’ll be harder to collect user data, so you’ll need to be smarter to do so – and smarter when you have that data to really understand each contact in your database to make your data work harder for you.
Increasingly interactive content
With voice-enabled interactive technology such as Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri, becoming close to ubiquitous, there is every chance that digital content is going to get ever more interactive and individual.
We’re perhaps some way off the next big breakthrough in this area, but who hasn’t found themselves getting comfortable having a chat with Siri or Alexa? If there’s one thing we can tell from this trend, it’s that the written word is facing challenges from audio and video.
The quantity of video and audio content out there is on the rise and the way we interact with it is evolving.
This calls for greater planning around your translation process, be it for subtitle translation for video or script translation for audio content.
The rise of augmented reality
AR (augmented reality) isn’t quite ready to roll out into wider use yet – but there’s a good chance some pioneers in the digital marketing world will get ahead of the bandwagon this year. AR technology, like that pioneered most famously by Pokémon in 2016, superimposes images or additional text and information onto real-world footage.
Ikea are one of those ahead of the curve, and are reportedly working on a smartphone application that would allow users to project images of furniture into their house before purchase, to check how well it blends into the surroundings. There’s every chance that other companies will follow suit with digital content that revolutionises their own small niche over the coming months.
The written word might be facing challenges from data, audio and even AR – but language is as important as ever. If you want to make a genuine impact on your customer base, you’re going to need to speak in words they understand, no matter how clever your campaign is and which channels you’re using.
For that, trust the expert language translation services at Bubbles Translation.
