At the end of May, KPCB released Mary Meeker's latest Internet Trends Report — here are some of the highlights.
In the digital world, Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report is one of the most highly anticipated events of the year. As Search Engine Watch points out in a write up of the report, the 355-slide report serves as the industry’s “barometer for the state of digital across the globe, as well as a forecast for what is likely to come.”
2017’s report was released on May 31st and covered a wide range of topics including gamified marketing and social media-based customer support. The report also dedicated 69 pages to digital advertising and ecommerce trends, many of which are highly relevant to the healthcare industry. Here are three of the key takeaways for medical marketers.
Unsurprisingly, Google and Facebook continue to dominate the digital advertising market, and managed to pull even farther away from the pack over the course of the past year. Together, they represent 85% of the total year-over-year (YoY) digital advertising growth in the U.S — a number that’s expected to increase in the future.
Google still generates the most digital ad revenue (more than $35 billion in 2016), but it was no match for Facebook in terms of revenue growth. The social network saw an increase by 62% from 2015 to 2016, compared to Google’s increase of 20%.
These numbers kind of say it all: Google and Facebook are clearly where you should be spending the bulk of your medical marketing dollars. And while Google still dominates the market in terms of revenue, Facebook has invested a lot of energy into its advertising platform, and those efforts seem to be paying off. Its advanced features and functions (not to mention its nearly two-billion-strong user base) are winning many marketers over. That’s not to say that Google hasn’t been investing in its own advertising capabilities as well — 2016 saw a number of major updates, including the rollout of demographic targeting, cross-device attribution, and more.
YoY mobile advertising growth accelerated from 20% in 2015 to 22% in 2016. This further supports the prevailing notion that the future of advertising in all industries — healthcare included — is mobile.
In addition to making sure all websites and digital content are optimized for mobile, medical marketers should start focusing on mobile-centric advertising tactics, like click-to-call and social media advertising (specifically on primarily mobile platforms like Snapchat and Instagram).
The 2017 Internet Trends Report shows that in the past year, voice search has continued to grow in terms of adoption; however, as SEW explains, “we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what it can do.”
As I just mentioned, mobile search volume saw a big spike in 2016, and there’s been a corresponding increase in mobile voice queries — in fact, 20% of all mobile searches are now made via voice.
Voice search’s continued growth can largely be attributed to technological improvements, with Google’s machine learning and natural language processing tech hitting an accuracy rate of 95% last year.
These improved capabilities have actually changed the way people search, with almost 70% of requests processed by Google Assistant being made using natural language. As voice search adoption continues to rise, medical marketers will need to adapt their strategies accordingly in order to improve accuracy and maintain a solid ROI.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can view the full report here. Or, if you’re not particularly interested in going through all 355 slides, feel free to reach out to me — on Twitter (@JonathanCatley) or directly — with any questions or comments you might have. I’m always up for a conversation about digital trends and technologies!