As you begin launching any new marketing campaigns at the beginning of the year, it’s a good idea to check out some of the latest marketing trends. While some marketing trends come and go, many of them have the potential to influence your own marketing efforts for the better, not to mention that the industry certainly latches onto certain marketing trends, which means you won’t want to fall behind. The following are a few of the marketing trends that we recommend looking into this February:

Noteworthy Marketing News

Gillette Takes a Social Stance And Goes Viral

As Nike showed us last year, taking a social stance helps make your company more relatable and can have a huge effect on brand awareness. Gillette recently published a video directly addressing the Me Too movement by commentating on toxic masculinity. Consumers obviously took note as the video racked up over 11. 5 views on YouTube within three days. Watch the Gilette video and read more about it at Marketing Land.

Living Coral Named Pantone’s Color Of The Year

Every year, Pantone names a color of the year. The entire design industry takes note as Panton names the color of the year based on careful analysis of the year’s color trends. This year, living coral–a shade of pink–was named color of the year after its use by Airbnb and Apple. Read more about Pantone’s color of the year at Adweek.

Army Implements New Recruitment Strategy For Generation Z

While marketers continually focus on the Millennial generation, a new generation has already begun to mature–Generation Z. Because recruitment has dropped significantly over the past year, the Army has decided to change their strategy to connect with Generation Z more effectively–by going digital, expanding recruitment to urban centers, and by getting creative. The Washington Examiner goes into greater detail concerning what the new Army recruitment strategy entails.

Improving Your Marketing Program

Learn How to Prepare This Year’s Marketing Strategy

Now that it’s 2019, reviewing last year’s marketing campaigns and planning this year’s marketing strategy ahead of time will help ensure that you hit the ground running. We’ve outlined eight steps that will help you to prepare your 2019 marketing strategy, including reviewing last year’s strategy, reviewing your target audience, and creating new SMART goals.

Find Out What Advertising Trends Are Going to Catch On This Year

As you begin to create your new marketing strategy, you’ll want to stay ahead of the game by keeping your eye on advertising trends that are likely to catch on throughout the year. We’ve gone over a number of advertising trends that we are starting to see within the industry and that we expect will grow in popularity as the year goes on, including a bigger emphasis on voice search, the growing importance of micro-moments, the increase in visual search, and more. Head over to our site to read more about 2019 advertising trends.

Check Out How to Create a Stronger Brand By Improving Your Package Design

The design of your product’s package has a huge impact on your brand identity. Learn how to attract the eye of your target audience and how to stand out from the competition by checking out our list of package design tips by our very own Mark Beebe.

Advertising Trends That Will Catch On In 2019

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Keep an Eye on Generation Alpha

Although Generation Z is the generation that’s currently maturing, some brands are looking even further ahead by targeting kids under the age of 10 that belong to Generation Alpha. Generation Alpha is the generation of tech-savvy children of Millennials that reports have shown are having a rising influence into the purchase habits of their households. Read more about Generation Alpha’s influence at AdAge.

Mobile Users Have Better Ad Awareness While Watching TV

According to Mobile Marketer’s recent article, consumers are more receptive to mobile advertisements when they’re relaxing at home, such as in front of the TV. While this does vary based on demographics, such information can be quite helpful for marketers in identifying when to best target their audience.

Twitter’s Commitment to Ensure Brand Safety for Video Advertisers

Last year, almost half of all of Twitter’s business came from video advertising. As a result, Twitter is making a concerted effort to create a brand safe environment for its video advertisers so that they can choose which publishers they are associated with or what content genres they want to be associated with. Find out more about how Twitter is creating a brand safe environment for video advertisers at Ad Exchanger.

Staying up to date with all the latest marketing trends is a great way to keep your marketing efforts fresh and to find new tactics that can help improve your overall marketing strategy. That’s why every month we like to share some of the latest marketing trends so that you can see what’s new. The following are some of the marketing trends that have been catching on lately.

Noteworthy Marketing News

YouTube Ad Campaigns Begin Targeting TV Screens

Although mobile is the dominant platform for YouTube views, more and more people are watching YouTube on their TVs. YouTube is extending their ad campaigns onto TV devices to provide advertisers with greater reach. AdWords API capabilities for TV targeting will be accessible to advertisers beginning on January 8. For more information about these new TV screen targeting capabilities, read Marketing Land’s recent article on the subject.

YouTube Phasing Out CTA Overlays In Favor Of New Ad Extensions

YouTube will begin offering their new ad extension for TrueView in-stream ads and will eventually offer them for bumper ads as well as TrueView video discover ads. Although a minor change, the CTA ad extensions will be able to be applied to new and existing overlays, whereas overlays are created as part of the ad. For more detail, read Ginny Marvin’s write-up on YouTube’s switch to CTA ad extensions at Marketing Land.

HubSpot Reorienting Itself As Platform Vendor

HubSpot has long been known as a product suite, but that’s changing soon as it realigns itself as a platform vendor. Following HubSpot’s recent partnership with AWS, HubSpot is planning to become a platform that will support an increasing population of apps that support interactions with HubSpot. Read more about HubSpot’s shift at Martech Today.

Improving Your Marketing Program

Advertising Trends That Caught On In 2018

We recently published a blog post reviewing some of the most effective marketing trends of 2018, including a focus on brand, authenticity, social change, and omnichannel marketing. Learn more about these 2018 marketing trends and how you can implement them into your marketing efforts in 2019 by reading Terry Becker’s post.

Clutch.co! Names Stevens and Tate Top Ad Agency in 2018

Here at Stevens and Tate, we have earned recognition for our marketing expertise for almost three decades. In 2018, we were named the top ad agency by Clutch, a third-party company that ranks B2B service providers on a yearly basis. Find out what Clutch had to say about our services by checking out the announcement on our blog.

Top 5 Marketing Tactics You Should Use in 2019

As you review your marketing strategy and prepare for the new year, you’ll want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your efforts. In this article, we go over five marketing tactics that you should make sure to implement into your marketing campaign if you haven’t done so already, including adding chatbots, producing video content, creating user-generated content, and more.

Why TV Advertising Remains Effective

Recent Marketing Reports, Updates, and Trends

Three View Behaviors Common On YouTube in 2018

If you’re using YouTube as part of your marketing efforts, then tracking how your users behave is an important part of figuring out how to best engage them. Three of the most common YouTube user behaviors of 2018 include viewing content exploring alternative and minimalist lifestyles, searching for inspiration, and searching for a way to connect. For more details into the behavior of YouTube users in 2018, read Gina Shalavi’s article on the subject.

The Return Of Trust In Media

Trust in media has been on the downslope since the late 1970s, reaching an all-time low in 2016. However, new studies show that the media is regaining the trust of the general public, in part due to a focus on transparency that includes attempts by journalists to defend their work, better fact-checking partnerships, and more. Learn more about how the media has become more transparent and has regained the public’s trust by checking out Sara Fischer’s article on Axios.

10 Agency Pros Explain How Their Workflow Was Improved By AI

Artificial Intelligence continues to develop at a rapid pace to the point where it’s starting to become commonplace. Businesses across the world are using AI to help improve the efficiency of their workflow. Find out how by reading the Forbes article in which ten agency pros describe in detail how AI has helped them to improve their workflows.

The year is almost coming to an end, which makes it the perfect time to take a look at some of the most popular advertising trends that caught on in 2018. The following are not only some of the most popular advertising trends of the year, but also some of the most effective ones that you may want to continue implementing into the new year.

1. Focusing On The Brand

Businesses are switching their marketing efforts to focus more on their brand than on their products and for good reason–focus on the brand will never become outdated, whereas product messaging will become outdated the moment you release a new product. Not to mention that by focusing on the brand, it will be easier to sell products and services, whereas focusing on a single product or service will not have that domino effect. By focusing on your brand, you can establish yourself as being more relatable to your customers. This is a challenge if you’re just focusing on marketing products.

2. Being Authentic

Trying to appeal to your audience by being something you’re not simply doesn’t work anymore. Audiences are smart and they can tell whether or not you’re being authentic. They can sniff out a company that’s trying way too hard to be cool and to win over an audience. Being inauthentic is going to turn off your audience, not to mention potentially make your brand look dishonest.

Content Marketing Trends to Track in 2018

3. Embracing Social Change

It wasn’t long ago that businesses shied away from any kind of social issue (or anything that could be viewed as political) in fear that they might alienate part of their customer base. However, it turns out that by taking a stand for what you believe in, you’re more likely to strengthen your relationship with your audience. And even if you lose some customers as a result, odds are you’ll gain just as many for the same reason. A great example of a company embracing social change is Nike and their Colin Kaepernick ad.

4. Omni-Channel Marketing

There are a lot of marketing channels that you can use to reach your audience. However, picking and choosing one channel and focusing on it shouldn’t be the extent of your strategy. Businesses are leveraging multiple channels of marketing and using them to compliment one another in what’s called omni-channel marketing.

Examples of this include promoting content on your website via your social media channels. These channels don’t need to be within the same type of marketing format either. Many businesses are crossing their inbound and outbound channels. For example, it’s not uncommon for a business to promote their social media presence on the commercials they’re running on TV. This kind of cross-channel promotion helps improve the effectiveness of your reach.

These were some of the biggest advertising trends of 2018. While they are called “trends” they are legitimate marketing strategies that should remain effective well into 2019, making them worth considering as a part of your future marketing campaigns.

Businesses tend to put extra effort into their advertising campaigns during the holiday season. While this is in part because people are buying gifts for one another, which means that there’s a general spike in sales, it’s also because Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become national institutions in themselves, a time when people search out great deals for things that they want. Because almost every business big and small offers deals at this time of the year in order to attract customers, stepping up your advertising efforts is the only way you’re going to stand out from the crowd.

4 Examples Of Successful Holiday Marketing Campaigns

The following are a four examples of some of the holiday marketing campaigns that have stood out over the past few years:

1) Coke

Coke put a twist on their famous “Share a Coke” ad campaign by running a holiday campaign that showed people sharing a coke instead of fighting over products at a mall. This ad works well because not only are people already familiar with the basis of the campaign, but they can also relate to fighting the crowds to get what they want before it sells out.

2) HotelTonight

The online hotel booking site’s clever campaign was headlined by the slogan “Visit, Don’t Stay.” This refers to how family members often visit one another and generally get into arguments or on each other’s nerves due to the holiday stress. Instead of staying with their family, they can stay at a hotel and simply “visit” their family.

3) John Lewis & Partners

John Lewis & Partners released their “Boy and his piano” commercial featuring Elton John this year that quickly went viral. It showed Elton John playing a song as the camera speeds through time, showing John as a younger and younger musician performing in front of huge crowds, finally settling on a version of him as a young boy getting a piano for Christmas. This ad is effective because of its use of a celebrity, its message of how a gift can change someone’s life (making it relevant to the holiday season), and in creating a feeling of nostalgia. The ad was particularly effective in that it did not specifically promote a product or sale, relying on its message to be its call-to-action.

5 Holiday Email Templates for Salespeople

4) McDonald’s

McDonald’s has used a variation of a campaign in which Santa stops by for a bite to eat at McDonald’s during his Christmas run for years now. But this year, McDonald’s stepped it up by making their ad campaign more interactive. For example, Spapchat users can play a game that makes them look like a reindeer and that requires them to catch as many falling carrots as they can.

5 General Tips For Your Holiday Marketing Campaign

Use these five tips to craft a marketing campaign that will help you stand out during the busy holiday season:

1) Make your ads holiday-themed

This one’s obvious, but find a way to tie your product or service into the holidays. The previously mentioned ads are great examples of how this can be done.

2) Use nostalgia

People often feel sentimental during the holidays, which means that using nostalgia is an effective way to make an emotional connection.

3) Use a sense of humor

The holidays can be quite stressful, which is why an ad that can make consumers laugh will stand out. See the HotelTonight ad as a fantastic example.

4) Make your offer stand out

Whether it’s a huge discount, a free trial, free shipping, or something else, your offer should stand out to make your ad stand out.

5) Find a way to engage

Get consumers engaged. This can be done by finding ways that consumers can interact with your campaign, whether it’s by holding contests or by providing short games that they can play, in the same way that McDonald’s did this year.

The holidays are a time of year where consumers are looking to spend the most money, which means businesses tend to step up their game when it comes to marketing their products and services. Use past holiday marketing campaigns as inspiration and keep in mind general holiday marketing tips to create a successful holiday marketing campaign of your own.

Businesses that stay up to date with all the latest marketing trends and news are more likely to see success due to the ability to adjust their marketing strategies accordingly as a result. As such, we like to highlight marketing news and trends every month as well as provide a bit of insight on how you can improve your marketing. The following are the latest marketing trends, news, and tips that we think are worth noting this November.

Noteworthy Marketing News

Google Launches AdLingo

Google recently launched its conversational marketing platform “AdLingo.” AdLingo provides the first conversational ad format outside of messaging apps, allowing advertisers to deliver ads that query users as well as respond to them. Read up on the ins and outs of the new AdLingo feature and why it matters to marketers at Marketing Land.

Pinterest Updates Ads Manager And Adds Product Pins Features

Ahead of the holiday season, Pinterest has improved its Ads Manager tool by allowing advertisers to choose business goals, select pins they want to promote, and to select an audience. They have also rebuilt their Product Pins system by adding stock information and dynamic pricing. Find out more about the changes made to their Ads Manager and Product Pins features by reading Marketing Land’s write-up.

Facebook Working On Connected TV Device

Facebook appears to be expanding its reach even further as they are rumored to be working on a connected TV device that will work in a similar fashion to Amazon’s Fire Stick or Roku. The Facebook TV rumor is explored in more detail in Marketing Land’s article, which also goes into the impact it could have on marketers.

Pandora Announces Ad Distribution Agreement With SoundCloud

Pandora has been busy making moves to become a major platform for advertisers. Not only has Pandora finally launched its own analytics tool, they also announced a new partnership with SoundCloud. According to Pandora, the partnership will make them the biggest digital audio advertising marketplace in the U.S. and will expand their addressable audience to 100 million. Marketing Land’s article goes into more detail about Pandora’s recent developments.

8 Tips on Social Media Best Practices For Your Business

Improving Your Marketing Program

Learn About The Differences Between Smart Display And Custom Intent Campaigns

AdWords continues to be a valuable marketing tool, which is why we recently explored two of their newest PPC options, Smart Display Campaigns and Custom Intent Campaigns. Check out our article to find out what the differences between the two features are and how they can benefit you.

The Importance of Social Media Engagement

One of the common mistakes advertisers make is to focus on their following instead of on engagement. Our recently published article highlights the importance of social media engagement and goes over several tips on how to improve your engagement on social media.

Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

Knowing the differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing will help to better inform your overall marketing campaign. We recently explored the differences between digital and traditional marketing, from the long-term and short-term impact to the costs and more.

Recent Marketing Trends, Reports, and Updates

Pew Reveals Relevant New Marketing Data

The Pew Research Center recently revealed new data that might surprise marketers. For example, broadband Internet penetration remains at only 65 percent amongst U.S. adults and that smartphone-only Internet usage has increased from 12 percent to 20 percent over two years. Head to Marketing Land for a more in-depth look into Pew’s recent marketing research.

Survey Reveals More Customers Plan To Use Amazon For Holiday Shopping

Amazon’s marketplace domination continues as a recent survey conducted by Survata revealed that the majority of holiday shoppers plan on using Amazon over any other online platform. In fact, the survey showed that online shoppers prefer Amazon 3-to-1 over Google. Check out what else the holiday shopping survey revealed at Marketing Land.

Marketers Focusing Primarily On Black Friday

A Nanigans study revealed that only five percent of retailers that responded are focusing any of their ad budget on late-season shoppers, while 25 percent of ad budgets will be spent on Black Friday weekend. Read Marketing Land’s article to find out more details about the holiday ad budget study.