As the door closes on 2014, marketers look ahead to the exciting trends that will shape the digital marketing landscape in 2015. People Pattern has compiled a short list of five tips to help marketers stay ahead of the game in the New Year.
1. Brands: Lead the Conversation
It’s not enough for brands to listen to conversations and react after the fact. In what Forrester coined the “Age of the Customer”, consumers are looking to brands to understand trends and stay ahead of the curve.
In 2015, brands will have an even greater responsibility to provide more personalized experiences to customers and clients. The first step is to know who the target is. From there, marketers can take a deep dive into specific segments to understand the nuances of persona demographics, psychographics and intent. Brands like Airbnb have benefited by understanding the folks within their communities in order to create a space that encourages users to engage, contribute, and return to the brand as customer advocates. With a better idea of a brand audience, brands can influence customers by providing valuable products, insights and experiences.
2. Pay to Play: Spend Your Resources Wisely
We established this past year that organic is dead, and marketing is pay to play. In 2014, Facebook implemented big changes in its advertising capabilities. Late summer the data behemoth rolled out a “people-based” ad tech system. Two months later, Facebook announced plans to curtail unpaid marketing efforts, limiting the reach of organic advertisements.
Next year, marketers will rely heavily on data to drive campaigns and measure success. Market research will become important as a way to understand details beyond demographics, and will help to provide insights into determining the best platforms to invest in. From there, marketers will use data to learn more about the kinds of content that segments and personas wish to see from the brand. With new opportunities to harness data, investments in paid media has proven to be a fruitful solution to spreading brand awareness and generating ROI.
3. Targeted Marketing
Listening tools are so 2011. Conversation monitoring is not enough to keep up with the ever changing and fickle nature of the increasingly conscious consumer. In 2015, brands will have to have a greater focus on the individuals behind their brand in order to maintain good relationships with the customers. Competitive brands like Uber and Lyft have invested heavily in understanding nuances of their audiences in order to lure customers and drivers away from the competition to become loyal to one of the other.
In 2015, new tools for marketing will enable brands to get hyperlocal in their targeting efforts. Global brands will be empowered with the ability to connect with current, aspirational and competitive audiences on an individual level, while maintaining a consistent brand identity.
4. Think Mobile
Mobile advertising ruled shopping this year. Black Friday saw record breaking online shopping, of which a significant percentage of purchases were made on mobile devices. Based on recent report published by Business Insider, mobile ad revenue is expected to top $42 billion by 2018, rising at a 5-year annual compound growth rate of 43% from 2013. The data suggests that there is room for growth in mobile ad space. It is up to marketers to take advantage of the opportunity.
Marketers will spend more on mobile advertising in 2015. In order to ensure that campaigns are successful and marketing dollars are well spent, decision makers should invest in tools that enable them to monitor engagement and optimize by operating system.
5. Data Scientists are the rockstars of the future
Ad tech has increasingly evolved into an industry where CMOs work hand in hand with data scientists. The exponential growth of data is transforming digital marketing. The availability of affordable high-speed computing power and the emergence of software like Hadoop and Spark are democratizing the ability to synthesize large amounts of data previously only available for large institutions and enterprise companies. The application of data science allows digital marketers to develop actionable conclusions to affect positive business outcomes.
Big data is essential to the marketer’s toolbox. Data provides insights that allows sophisticated digital marketers to create braver, bolder more personalized content for their audience. Audience targeting and personalized predictive marketing using social data are expected to be some of the business areas that benefit the most from mining big data. In 2015, new tools will become available to marketers to harness insights in order to streamline efforts and inform more sophisticated efforts.
Cheers to the New Year!
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