Design & Marketing trends for 2017 • Digital Branding strategy

By Konbi
First published in French on January 26, 2017

The way to communicate for businesses has completely changed with the advent of the Internet, just as the very purpose of communication and marketing.

In 2017, digital communication is essential, both for the building of a brand and its notoriety, prospecting and commercial development, and for the management of customer relations (now called community management in the Social Media era).

The time when one could still think that a website had no other purpose than to be the intangible showcase of a company is totally over. On the web, the market and competition are globalized and never sleep. Even sectors of activity where the direct and physical relationship between the seller and the buyer seems unavoidable undergo major upheavals. For example, art galleries, who still thought a year or two ago that online art dealers would never be able to compete with them directly, now feel the wind turning.

By 2017, with nearly all consumers in Europe, Asia and USA own a smartphone and broadband access to the Internet, which means that access to communication and how to communicate with consumers has changed completely. Developing your brand's reputation through traditional communication campaigns is no longer enough to spread your messages, effectively target your prospects and guarantee your place in your market. It is all the more remarkable that the evolution of the forms of communication now allow advertisers to break down their communication budget towards design and creation, to the detriment of broadcasting, which is done at a lower cost because it is totally dematerialized. It's the quality and effectiveness of the relationship between your brand and your consumers that find themselves at the heart of the experience that you may be able to offer your customers in 2017.

The communication strategy to envision, for a company or a charity, inevitably passes through a long-term phase of content creation, also known as brand content. Re-exploiting a list of queries and keywords gleaned from Google aren't the only guarantee for success which will allow you to stand out and make a difference in your industry.

KarmaWeather by Konbi has become in less than 2 years one of the world leaders in Chinese astrology and love compatibility calculation, on the web and on the iPhone. Illustration CAL © KarmaWeather by Konbi

The quality of texts, videos, images (photographs and illustrations) and podcasts you produce are the most important criteria to consider. Without a permanent search for quality, you won't be able to generate the interest necessary to the development of your community, and thus of your brand.

At the same time, there is a need for a comprehensive benchmark (competition analysis), especially by exploiting the results displayed on the first result page of Google, for keyword combinations that have a direct link with your business model. Your competitors today aren't linked to physical geography anymore (local, regional, national, urban, etc ...), but on the first page of Google, on social networks and on YouTube, which have now relegated traditional media, television and radio to the background. As such, the advertising budgets devoted to Google and Facebook accounted for 68% of investments in France in 2016.

Why is content quality the key to success? Because by distinguishing yourself from your competitors you can loyalize consumers to your brand, and you pleasantly surprise the leads who discover you, as well as avoiding to disappoint those who return. As a result, the first website statistics to watch carefully on Google Analytics are the evolution of time spent, bounce rate and the number of page views per visit, reminding yourself that Google's algorithm considers these criteria in determining the relevance, quality and interest of your articles.

In the same way, if you publish original and relevant topics about your brand, the services and products it offers, you increase your chances of being relayed organically (and for free) by Internet users on Social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp ...), creating new sources of traffic to your site, in addition to the organic traffic generated by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo...).

Konbi can effectively support you in your brand building strategy, perfectly in line with the trends of web design and digital marketing in 2017, by providing you with its expertise in communication strategy and digital design, graphic design, branding, logo creation, brand content, creation of animated films, implementation of a dedicated SEO strategy, communication plans on social networks and community management missions.

© Konbi - All rights reserved. Reproduction strictly prohibited without prior agreement. Any infringement will be subject to a DMCA request to Google