Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends and Tactics for 2015
January 8, 2015 - 7 minutes read - Inbound Marketing, Marketing TrendsHappy New Year, friends! The year 2014 brought many exciting twists and turns to our ever-changing industry. We saw a dramatic surge in mobile content consumption, technology that boosted ad retargeting response by up to 400 percent, and new ways of approaching local marketing. What’s in store for 2015? We expect many of the same trends from 2014 to remain constant, but there are also a few new concepts to wrap your mind around as well. Here we present five digital marketing trends and tactics to consider when drawing up your strategy for 2015. As always, if you would like assistance creating your marketing plan or implementing any portion of it, Mod Girl Marketing is fully equipped to help!
Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2015
1. The emergence of real-time marketing
A few savvy marketers already specialize in a trend known as “real-time marketing” — and have been since the dawn of Twitter. Yet, it’s a tactic that takes dedicated personnel and resources, which every company may not have. Yet, the people that have been engaged in connecting with their consumers have seen big dividends. One study found that 81% of marketers saw increased customer engagement, 73% saw improvements in their customer experience, 59% saw increased conversion rates, and 52% saw improved brand perception.
Marketers are working closely with digital consultants and data experts to gauge the effectiveness of their branding campaigns. They are tinkering, adjusting and re-configuring pay per click ads and social media posts in real-time. They’re creating timely, relevant, branded content that taps into the zeitgeist. They’re actively seeking out people who need their products or services and are reaching out with solutions. They’re responding to disgruntled shoppers or inquisitive prospects that post on social media channels, which have become the new “contact” form, in consumers’ eyes. Is it a lot of work? Yes! Is it what the best companies do? Again… Yes!
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2. Ad retargeting
The “ad retargeting” strategy uses browser cookies to track website visitors after they leave your site. Later, the products or services they viewed will be shown to them again on advertisements on other websites they’re surfing. In advertising, we call that an “impression.” The exact number of impressions needed to make a sale is up for debate, but the Online Marketing Institute suggests this “magic number” is somewhere between 7 and 13.
Image Source: Retargeter.com
It’s believed that, for most websites, only two percent of web traffic buys on the first visit. These are the “impulse buyers” and well-groomed repeat prospects. For the rest of the crowd, it will take time and effort to stay in the minds of consumers, but the repeat exposure to your brand’s logo and message will eventually pay off in the long run. We expect retargeting to be part of the everyday operations for more marketers in 2015.
3. The rise of social shopping
With the new “call-to-action” buttons on Facebook (“Download now,” “Learn more,” and “Buy Now”), we can expect this trend to make its way to all social media platforms in 2015. Pinterest has partnered with Shopify to further develop their “buy from website” button debuted in 2014. In September, Twitter announced that they were testing a “buy” button for branded tweets.
Mobile donation sites tested the waters for us, showing just how powerful social ecommerce can be. Technology like Yik Yak will likely be important in helping businesses connect with local people who are primed and ready to buy.
4. A whole lot more video marketing
Video marketing is nothing new, but the last year has been exhilarating. We’ve seen an increase in video ads across social media networks, thanks to Google video ad services — especially on Facebook and Instagram. One study found that YouTube brand engagement was 20x greater than Facebook engagement. Micro-video sites like Vine and Snapchat showed just how creative marketers can be. To improve conversions, marketers began transcribing their blogs and other content into quick, punchy videos.
Image source: Syndacast.com
The results are clear: video marketing translates to sales. According to a Brafton study, 44 percent of consumers said viewing a video encouraged them to convert. Last year, six percent more marketers used video than social media, which is truly a testament to video’s popularity! Just this month, Google announced a new analytic tool that will tell advertisers if their videos have been viewed. By some estimates, 74 percent of all internet traffic will be video by 2017.
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5. Diversified content
Long gone are the days where a company’s content strategy consists of setting up a blog and promoting those posts via their social media accounts. Consumers are bombarded by so much content and so many different channels that they are developing a taste for picking and choosing what they’d like to gobble up at any given moment. Perhaps they’ll listen to a podcast in their car on the way to work, check out an infographic in their email inbox, view a couple online videos on lunch break, and read longer articles after dinner. Your plate no longer looks like a meaty pile of BLOG; you’ve now got a side of video, infographics, memes, lists, and many, many other types of content.
Image source: Webbizideas.com
Since each business is unique, we’re likely to see marketers casting a wide and varied net, sorting out what works using analytics, and cruising full-sail after the types of content that prove most fruitful.
