In our overly stimulated culture, we are continually looking for the next best thing. The next best app, the next best morning super drink, or even the next best life partner. But in business, finding the next best thing is crucial to staying competitive in the marketplace, thrilling clients, and innovating your brand.

We must force ourselves to think outside the proverbial box to stay ahead of the curve. As we look forward to 2018, we see three major areas that continue to grow with unrelenting speed. Here are three of our favorite branding trends that will just get bigger and badder in 2018.

Short Attention Span Theater: Increase Your Infographics

Admit it; you love infographics. We are visual beasts, after all, us humans. Instead of droning on for paragraphs and pages, you can communicate information in a visual way with sparse bits of text. It’s also a quick read, thus appealing to our minuscule attention span.

They grab reader attention. They’re fun and colorful. Most of all, they showcase the significant data to get the reader interested. They are more likely to share infographics on social media resulting in larger reach and hopefully, engagement.

Extra added bonus: No worrying about how to use a semicolon.

A Little Scary and a lot of Awesome: Artificial Intelligence

Sure, it’s appealingly sci-fi in the way that soon robots will clean our homes and make our meals for us ala The Jetsons. It’s also equally terrifying as you imagine The Matrix or Terminator coming to life just because we didn’t want to do the math. Either way, AI is the wave of the future, so you’ll need to lean in and get excited.

Using AI, we can gain tons of valuable information about consumers that help with direct marketing and target marketing, both sure ways to increase sales.

Keep it Movin’: Mobile Based Websites

Do you remember what it was like before mobile phones? Yeah, neither do we. Mobile phones, especially smartphones are hands-down, the most popular and ubiquitous trend of our current millennia. They have evolved from on-the-go phones to mini-computers we can run nearly every function of our lives from. As a result, 90% of people shop and research purchases and services on their mobile phones.

First, ask yourself this question: Is your target demographic using smartphones as much or more often than a traditional computer? If your answer is yes, read on.

Many company websites are not mobile-friendly, which means phone cut off text, doesn’t load pages or forms correctly or at all, and causes users to give up and do something else.

You just lost a potential client.

If you have a mobile-responsive web design, you can pull that prospect in further. The design holds up and pages load faster. When you move at the speed of the prospect’s attention span, your chances to land them increase drastically.

So, if your ideal client will be finding you on their smartphone, be sure to create a website they can interact with easily.

Following every trend that comes along can be a hazardous business, but carefully evaluating trends for your industry and client demographic is critical to growth and on-going success.

Look at the three trends above and consider adding at least one to your branding strategy in 2018.