Have you seen Mary Meeker's latest report of Internet trends? There's a fair chance you have. The Slideshare featured at the end of this post has been viewed by over one million since it was released on the 31st May. It's testament to the quality of insight in the report, with a reputation built up over 10 years. What we can add, other than alerting you to it, is a summary of implications for marketers since many of the charts in the 355(!) slide report are similar to previous years and not directly relevant to digital marketing.
Well, it had to happen, after banging the drum about the rate of mobile growth for many years, Mary Meeker leads with this summary of the main trends:
This chart shows how smartphone shipment growth tailed off dramatically in 2016 (and the dominance of Android).
Marketer's implications: The main implication for marketers here is in forecasting marketing leads and sales, where upward trends in online contributions from annual marketing leads and forecasts should be reduced.
In our regular update on digital marketing trends for 2017, we have featured the growing importance of this duopoly. As with much insight from this report, Meeker's example is from the US, but shows the dominance and growth of these two platforms against other platforms. Facebook's ad revenue growth in particular is marked.
Marketer's implications: If you're not using these paid platforms, at least for re-targeting, then you are likely missing out on driving visitors through the customer lifecycle stages.
The impact of this trend is shown by Google's recent announcement of the inclusion of an Adblocker in Chrome, albeit for its own ads, but poor quality ads.
Marketing implication: This and low ad clickthrough rates suggests the importance of using Native advertising and content marketing to get your message through. Some publishers like Adage.com are encouraging whitelisting of ad blockers.
You will have heard, or maybe experienced, the growth of Amazon's Echo featuring Alexa. The report has an interesting chart showing the shipments of Echo which are significant.
Also interesting, is the rise in voice search with these stats from use of Google's Assistant showing that nearly 70% of Requests on Google's Assistant are Natural / Conversational Language and perhaps more surprising 20% of Mobile Queries are made via voice.
Marketing implication: If they're not already, search marketers should be trying to answer their common users questions by featuring in Google's rich snippets format.
The customer service trends focus on:
Meeker's report should be a must-read for retailers since she has many examples (e.g. p58 to 78) of retailers with high growth rates that are adopting innovative techniques including Untuckit
The report has many other slides which may be of interest if you specialise in working in one of these market sectors. Tends in these areas are:
Full report is on Slideshare
[slideshare id=76530316&doc=internettrends2017report-170531162415]
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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