If you pay attention, you’ll notice a quiet revolution happening in the world of marketing. Mobile is quickly becoming the go-to channel for a variety of strategies designed to reach your customer. If you’re not using mobile yet, you will soon be. Here are 7 trends to take notice of to start developing a strategy to add mobile to your marketing mix in 2018.

1. Mobile Video

It’s been predicted that in 2018, people will spend about 36 minutes watching videos on their mobile devices, where they’ll spend just 18.5 minutes on non-mobile devices. That’s reason alone to invest in mobile video content and mobile advertising for your brand. With different formats for mobile video ads, there are a variety of ways to engage with your audience, as well as get them to click to your website from the device that has their attention throughout the day. Remember less is more, keep videos under two-minutes to gain traction.

2. Mobile SEO

This is far beyond having a responsive website. It’s a given that your website design will adapt based on the device it’s being viewed on. Mobile SEO is about how your mobile website focuses on core ranking, indexing and leveraging mobile keywords. Keys to success are the following:

• Focus on relevancy, usefulness and authority
• It must download quickly
• Create a mobile index
• Fix mobile-friendly errors
• Do mobile keyword research and content creation

Also know that in 2018, Google will rank search results based on the mobile friendliness of websites too, so if you’re planning on updating your site keep mobile top of mind.

3. Mobile Search

You may have optimized your website for desktop searches, but you’ll need to take another gander to make sure it’s mobile friendly in terms of search, too. Because so many searches for local businesses happens on mobile devices with intent to buy, it’s imperative that your website content uses keywords to attract local customers. Consider long-tail keywords, that include the neighborhood your business is located in within those keywords.

Also know that voice search is huge with mobile, so people are searching differently. Rather than typing in “restaurant best steak Philadelphia,” a user might voice search with Siri, Amazon Echo or Google Home “What’s the best place to get a cheesesteak in Philly?” Knowing this, you can use these semantic search phrases in your SEO to better reach your mobile audience.

4. Mobile Apps

Mobile apps have been all the rage for years, and they’re not going anywhere. While not every business needs to invest in the expense of designing an app, they can be beneficial for many industries including restaurants, lifestyle bloggers, fashion, art, health and fitness, and of course productivity/software businesses. But your app better be worth it. People aren’t willing to give up precious data to a hog app that runs in the background.

Before diving in, ask yourself what your purpose is in building an app. How will it better serve your customers? Are you prepared to invest in marketing the app to boost users? What’s your end goal? Having a mobile app strategy will help you be successful in this endeavor.

5. In-App Mobile Content

You may be focusing on creating great content on your blog, but you need great mobile friendly content too. Why? Because Google now searches apps for content and shows it in search results.

Having valuable and up-to-date content in your mobile app may help you attract more app users and customers simply because Google will acknowledge it, so divert some of your content marketing efforts to that mobile app.

6. Mobile Gamification

Whether you want to boost use of your mobile apps, get people to redeem mobile coupons, or have users share your content on social media, mobile gamification can help.

People like challenges. Imagine a marketing campaign where you enter anyone who opens your app every day for two weeks into a drawing for a vacation. Or giving a coupon to anyone who shares your content on Facebook. By requiring people to make tiny efforts, you can have a huge impact on your mobile marketing.

7. Mobile Ads

Mobile pay-per-click ads can help you connect with the millions of smartphone users who are searching on their phones for businesses — especially local ones.  Beyond mobile video ads (which should be no more than :15-:20 seconds) are growing in popularity. There’s growing interest in Google shopping ads which are pay-per-click ads that allows you to show up in Google search results even if your target is blocking ads. Facebook ads, are now mobile friendly, and can help you boost engagement of your Facebook page through mobile use. With over two-thirds of Facebook traffic being mobile, there is far more available inventory to optimize.

There are other mobile ad options to consider, like banner ads, retargeting ads, display ads within app content or on mobile websites. The key is: go mobile with your ads, because that’s where your audience is.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.