Marketers are constantly looking into the future to predict the trends and the customer behaviors that would put their brands ahead of the game. As 2016 is coming to an end, digital marketers can help but think what would 2017 be like in this fast-paced environment? What would be the next successful campaign?

In 2016, we witnessed the rise of mobile advertising and the generation of video-live streaming.72% of marketers agree that traditional marketing methods (e.g. print media, direct mail, infomercials) are not enough to fulfill all different marketing activities: from customer acquisition, conversion to customer retention and loyalty (Source: Mondo). In addition, companies are digging more into the big-data side of marketing by creating attribution models and predicative analysis leading to highly concentrated customer-centric measurement. It is inarguable that involving the customers in the decision-process is critical for any organizations in order to leverage their performance and stand out.

Based on the trends and the movement of the industry in 2017, here are some of my thoughts on how 2017 would be:

1. Customer Journey Visualization will be the next big thing. At presence, marketing automation process is an important tool that many corporations use to engage with their customers. Depending on the purchasing behaviors and the recency of the the orders, customers are put in specific groups where the companies would target each group with specific campaigns, ranging from: abandon-cart engagement, early-bird sale, cross-sell, and win-back. Marketing automation process is a series of events through mainly email marketing and mobile push notification. Customer journey visualization is a step further from marketing automation process. Each customer will be put on a specific pathway based on real-time data that is updated on a daily basis. The model is meant to provide actionable insights to better customer engagement and satisfaction.
2. Integrated Marketing is crucial to leverage performance. Traditionally, each media channels often perform a specific duties. In common practices, social media is often used to gather customer feedback and customer engagement. Email marketing is for customer retention. Mobile advertising is for brand awareness and sales promotion. However, as customer purchase decision is getting complicated, one channel for one function is not adequate anymore. Nowadays, consumers tend to view multiple websites, look at numerous sources from different devices before arriving at the purchasing stage. As a result, in order to meet customers at every possible touchpoints, collaborative effort is needed from all channel to communicate consistent message.
3. Augmented Reality would make an impact on Digital Marketing. At the moment, augmented reality is not an alienated concept for most of us, especially phenomenon named “Pokemon Go” which put the social media in storm during summer 2016. Augmented reality is predicted to not for branding purpose but for engagement. Since the technology allows customer to emerge in real-time experience, it is predicted to give companies competitive advantage upon launching demo products and services. Moreover, due to the massive coverage, augmented reality would also allow marketers to capture bigger audience size at anytime and anywhere.