1mostMobile has come to stay and has already moved past the desktop in many areas. This development will for sure continue in the next few years, which is why digital marketers need to find new ways to attract mobile users.

The zenith of apps has been exceeded

There are already apps en mass on the market and many companies have even several apps for individual services, products or even their mobile website. However, most of the apps are not really accepted. Nine out of ten users install an app, try it once, and then uninstall it again. The trend is therefore going into another direction: Google continues to position its mobile standard AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), including SEO advantages. The clou of AMP is that it not only speeds up the load time of a website, but also optimizes the presentation. In addition, with the Android Instant Apps, there is another service that makes individual apps superfluous. The mere fact that websites are getting better and better on mobile means that the zenith of apps will be exceeded in 2018.

Virtual and augmented reality

Not only has the smartphone become a constant companion, it is also more powerful than ever. For the next mobile marketing trend it actually has to be almighty tough, as the Virtual Reality (VR) will play an important role this year. Affordable opportunities to explore the virtual reality are still rare and just slowly picking up. Nevertheless, in 2018, more people than ever will enjoy the new feature and the new, immersive form of media experience will position itself and shake up the digital marketing market. Hence, the question isn’t any more whether, but just when you deal with it. Augmented Reality (AR) is already one step ahead of VR, since generally no additional devices are needed here. That the merger of reality with virtual additions can be mass-marketable Pokemon Go already has taught us – and not only that. It showed us that marketing with augmented reality can work brilliantly. Especially on social media, and Facebook in particular, big things can be expected in terms of AR in 2018.

Voice search changes SEO

There are studies that say the number of voice users will exceed 50% of all smartphone users by 2020. The new way to search will change the SEO area and the revolutionizer is called once again smartphone: How to reconcile voice search with search engine optimization? Will we still search for single words or sentences? How should the content be adjusted? Especially in the semantic area, the mobile search engine optimization 2018 will make a leap. The fact that Google has announced its own mobile index is just the tip of the iceberg.

Mobile video

Video is already an important part of mobile marketing and will continue to grow in 2018. Automatically starting videos, micro-videos, videos without sound, the list of challenges in this area is long. Anyway, the growing video consumption goes hand in hand with the improvement of the mobile network. Even larger videos are no longer tied to one place, but can be enjoyed thanks to LTE virtually everywhere in high quality. Undecided marketers will need to be more active here, otherwise they will lose one of the most important touchpoints with potential customers.

Faster loading times

Not only videos load faster in 2018, even the mobile website does. Nevertheless, one of the main reasons of a high mobile bounce rate is still the slow loading time. Due to the fact that not everyone has good mobile Internet, the availability of LTE varies greatly, and badly programmed mobile sites do the rest: Google has found that 40% of users leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. A site loses 7% of its visitors every second of loading time. And that’s only lost traffic, without regard to conversions. For that reason alone, improving the load time of a website in 2018 is still essential for any digital marketer.

Push messages as a gateway to the mobile user

Push messages are one of the most effective ways to communicate with mobile users, although they are in general a sensitive topic: Smartphone owners only tolerate them if they offer added value, otherwise, the permission or even the app are quickly a has-been. In practice, companies that send two push messages a day get the best results. The app engagement increases on average to fifteenfold and even the conversion rate benefits and increases by 6%. Best of all, Android and iOS have made push messages more interactive and user-friendly, making them even more powerful.

By MediaBUZZ