8 Digital Marketing Trends We Hope Stay in 2017
| December 20, 2017 | Posted in Marketing
The world of digital marketing is in a constant state of flux. Trends come and go every year to varying degrees of success. Today, our expert team is sharing the top digital marketing industry trends of 2017 that we hope stay in 2017. While these strategies may have worked for some digital marketing teams, overall these are the worst digital marketing industry trends we’ve noticed during the past year.
1. Single-page Websites
I think it’s the very long, single-page websites, where everything went so mobile-first that we jumped the shark. It was definitely really sexy for a little while, but it created a scroll monster for visitors. It was also difficult to rank for SEO because you were sending people to a page that has everything – rather than the page they were really looking for.
-Lucas Stacey, Business Development Executive
2. Forced App Usage
Some websites were still not taking advantage of the responsive web design principle, and instead forced you to use specific apps. Responsive web design is important to me because I use my phone and tablet a lot. But it’s impossible to have a great user experience when some sites were still not living up to this hype. It’s difficult to navigate pages that are not responsive yet.
One of the worst offenders is Facebook, believe it or not. They don’t let me watch videos easily or scroll the page when I’m on my tablet. I think the reason for this is they want to force me to use their Facebook App. But I don’t want to install hundreds of apps when my storage is limited!
-Tina Conrad, Developer
3. Home pages with Multi-Slide Main stages or ‘Carousel Banners’
The farther past the first slide your content is, the less chance anyone will ever see it. It adds unnecessary load times to your home page, and hides possibly important information. Special offers, news, and/or updates would be better served as pathways lower in the page.
-Joe Sites, Developer
This Nielsen study showed that a carousel homepage banner underperforms for these main reasons:
- Auto-sliding images reduce accessibility for users with disabilities
- Visibility for any one item is drastically reduced
- Users identify sliding images as advertisements and ignore them
4. Full-width Header Images
While having your page’s header image span the full width of the page is fine, it can lead to strange cropping issues, or overly large images. If your image gets wider as your browser window expands, the image must either proportionally get taller, or must be cropped to retain the same height. If you use photos of people, or objects, instead of abstract photos, you will inevitably have undesirable crops.
-Joe Sites, Developer
5. Overloaded Website Animation
Subtle animations can enhance a webpage, but over-animating everything causes a sensory overload. The main content and focus of the site can get lost in the shuffle. You are just distracting people from looking at the shiny things on the site by showing them shinier, moving things. Anything used in moderation can be great, but unfortunately people tended to abuse these design features in 2017.
-Sean McGinnis, Visual Designer
6. Experimental Website Navigation
Experimental navigation was unfortunately popular in 2017. You want to keep things fresh in design and not recycle the same type of layouts over and over again – but there’s something to be said for following basic design principles when creating a layout. If you make a design counterintuitive, then it becomes difficult to navigate and frustrates the user. This leads to higher bounce rates and a general distaste for your overall brand.
-Sean McGinnis, Visual Designer
Learn what basic design principles to follow by reading our article & infographic, “Improve your Website’s Navigation with these 9 Best Practices.”
7. Only Focusing on Local SEO
Many companies abandoned other digital marketing strategies in favor of putting all of their efforts into local SEO. This is a huge problem for regional companies. Having a good digital marketing strategy and high conversion rates are far more important than having a few more directories set up properly.
-Chris Gaffney, Project Leader
8. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has definitely been overhyped in 2017. Most businesses don’t see returns in the social media space. It’s a great public relations space, but translation to ROI is not straightforward, and it is more about promoting brand awareness.
-Chris Gaffney, Project Leader
According to this Paychex survey, a person would be much less likely to do business with you if you don’t have a website than if you don’t have a social media presence. So instead of putting a major chunk of your marketing budget into social media, put it towards your website instead!
Share Your Opinions
Disagree with our opinions? Let us know in the comments if any of these industry trends worked for you this year – or if there’s any 2017 trends you hated that we didn’t mention!
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