28 Oct 2025

Top 6 Digital Marketing Trends Of 2017

As the year draws to a close, let’s take a look back at the top 6 digital marketing trends for 2017. Hopefully, this post gives you a nice recap of this amazing year, and a sneak peek into what to expect for the new year!

Trend No.#1: Personalized Content Marketing

According to Content Marketing Institute’s definition of content personalization, it is a “strategy that exploits visitor or prospect data to deliver relevant content based on the interests and preferences of the target audience.”

Indeed, personalized content marketing is a strategy that many forward-looking companies have utilized this year. According to PWC’s Digital Services group, 94% of senior-level executives believe that delivering personalized content is important to reaching specific customers. Indeed, it is a trend that marketers who deliver personalized customer experiences enjoy more than a double-digit return in marketing performance and response.

And personalization is changing content marketing– companies that take advantage of the benefits of personalized content marketing would outsell companies which do not by more than 20% by 2018! So have you hopped on board this trend yet? If not, find out how to personalise marketing, or hire a digital marketing agency to do the work for you!

Trend No.#2: Mobile Ad Trends

Mobile advertising is huge. According to a survey, 69 percent of digital media time is spent on mobile, when American users are commuting from one place to another. In addition, studies have projected a $143 billion total spending on mobile ads in the whole of 2017.

In particular, mobile video ad spending was projected to exceed $6 billion just in the USA by the end of this year, and that shows the increasing power of video marketing (look at point #4 for more details!). In China, the revenue size pie of mobile ad marketing is huge. Yet the Japanese mobile ad revenue tops that of China, albeit a projection that this is set to change in 2018.

Economically developed regions with countries like Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong also have a higher effective cost per millie (CPM) than developing regions. CPM is a marketing term used to denote the price of 1,000 advertisement impressions on one webpage.

Unsurprisingly, the power of mobile is huge in advertising. Impactful mobile ad campaigns can allow for a more seamless online-offline transition from intention to purchase, which is exceedingly powerful as a tool to use. Want to get started on mobile advertising? We offer digital marketing services for mobile devices through Facebook ads, Google Adwords, and Instagram marketing!

Trend No.#3: Reminder of The Real Influencer Marketing

According to this 2017 survey on influencer marketing, 84% of marketers plan on executing at least one influencer marketing campaign at the start of 2018. Before we talk about the benchmark behind a great influencer marketing campaign, let us first examine what is meant by not-so-successful influencer marketing campaigns in 2017.

Remember the cringe-worthy FAVES ASIA Video?

Or remember the aspirational Fyre Festival video involving some of the top Hollywood celebrity influencers…

…which resulted in really bad publicity and various lawsuits against the organizers because promises to ticket holders were broken?

Examples of influencer video marketing campaigns going horribly wrong only serve as great reminders of the power of real influencer marketing. In this era where fake Facebook likes and views can be easily purchased, earning the trust of your targeted customer base has become more and more essential.

Impactful influencer marketing campaigns gain the trust of your readers or prospects in a powerful manner because the personal branding and brand values of your brand ambassadors and your product/ services are aligned. Read more about our thoughts on how reliable influencer marketing in Singapore is.

Trend No.#4: Videos, Videos and More Videos!

Digital marketing expert James McQuivey estimates that a single minute of video content is the equivalent of 1.8 million words. According to Simply Measured, videos are shared 1,200% more than the textual and pictorial mediums online.

That is pretty high engagement! Consumers now want to watch and produce videos at the same time, instead of having select groups of people producing the videos while the masses consume them. In this manner, the line between consumers and producers are increasingly blurred.

2017 has seen the popularity of live streaming on various social media platforms as well. Interestingly, square videos are growing in popularity, because they take up 78% more space in the Facebook News Feed, and get more engagement than horizontal videos. See how we helped our client boost conversion rates through video production!

Trend No.#5: Growth of the Chatbots

In Q3 2017, a report by PwC and CB Insights found that funding exceeded $1 billion across 91 deals for A.I. companies in America.

Chatbots are artificial intelligence (A.I) programmes that communicate with native users via speech, text, or messaging. They are powered by continual learning algorithms and unsurprisingly are used on social media platforms such as Whatsapp, WeChat, Slack, Facebook Messenger. Unsurprisingly, chatbots are fast becoming important in the e-commerce and m-commerce world, where increasing numbers of smartphone users spend considerable time each day.

In the B2C context, chatbots are used as text-based messaging interfaces in the area of customer service. Here, consumers can communicate with companies in a QnA format.

For example, Adidas’s chatbot received 2000 new sign-ups in under two weeks, just because customers felt their needs were promptly attended to. In addition, the chatbots used by H&M and Sephora powered through KiK messenger are used in line with the companies’ strategy of encouraging more online prospects to indulge in “discovery shopping”.

Trend No.#6: Fake News No More

2017 is also characterized by digital platforms fighting fake news.

Facebook, for example, has not only made it a point to block any advertisements that have links to fake news portals— but it has also been banning people and pages from advertising on Facebook if they have a digital history of propagating content that has been flagged as fake news. This effectively deters people from using the mechanism of Facebook advertisements to promote fake news portals.

Google, for example, has also implemented some of its anti-fake news measures including fact-checking tools. In addition, they have also made it really easy for web surfers to report or give less priority to low-quality content that cannot be verified.

We hope you have enjoyed the top 6 noteworthy digital marketing trends for 2017!

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.