For business owners, 2017 will represent a great challenge and opportunity. With the decline of old technologies like QR codes and the rise of new technologies such as virtual reality and sophisticated speech recognition, you’ll have to be crafty with your marketing strategy to keep up. The beginning of the year is your chance to stay ahead of the social curve and stay fresh with new ideas.

Conversational Marketing

You may hear this a lot and it is one of the biggest buzzwords for 2017 but it’s true. Your social followers don’t want to hear from you, they want to talk with you.

This kind of marketing deserves its own subset into your plan this year.

Here are some ideas for conversational marketing in action:

Social Media Building: Listen to followers and engage in thoughtful discussion and insightful reads

Customer Surveys: Always ask for feedback in any scenario. This is a great way to make decisions if you’re unsure on how to approach something

Be accessible to everyone: Make it easy for someone to get in contact with you. Customer chat engines through your website, and social support will help you stand out.

Talk-to-Text Apps

With the emerging technology and sophistication of voice search, talk-to-text is shaping how people will find your website. As of right now it’s important to start considering Cortana and Siri in your 2017 campaign.

People searching for solution based services or products do not type the same way they speak into a voice search. Implementing a voice search strategy with longer keywords that are more ‘natural speak’ will make a great impact in your results, almost 45% of adults are using speech recognition software now and that number will continue increase.

Live Streaming

With Periscope and Facebook dominating live video content, 2017 might be the year they take over. If you are in any position where leveraging live streams make sense for your business, now would be a great time to get that project moving. Live streaming is a young medium that might still have hiccups but still can provide real-time engagement that is hard to ignore for many.