Digital Marketing Trends for 2015

Digital marketing is an extremely volatile and tricky industry which requires constant know-how improvement and keeping up with the trends. If you are a small business owner, forget about classic advertising on TV, radio and billboards, as it is too expensive and not so efficient. No worries, we have a few ideas that will help you implement market strategies for those on a strict budget. Check the best 10 digital marketing trends that will help your business to gain digital traction in 2015.

1. Content above all

Every marketer should know that “Content is King” when we talk about a successful business. Content is more than simple marketing messages and it focuses on branding and market positioning using tools such as storytelling, advice and entertainment. People are more convinced by brands that educate and are trusted advisors and they become loyal to the brand, through educational blogs and webinars, creative materials on social media, and inspirational stories. There will always be the need for content creators such as writers, developers, video producers, podcasters, and speakers to create a strong content branding strategy.

Tips: share your content in small portions, that are easily readable. Post them directly on your website with applications like Tint and consider having a blog, aside your business website, where you can share motivational, helpful stories related to your business or struggles you encounter along the road.

2. Video (more cute kitten videos?)

Video is definitively pictures taken at the next level, and when we talk about marketing, video has a greater quantifiable reach than images, articles or links or professional pages. In addition, Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google and people watch it anywhere, from any internet connected-device. Why is video content so good?  Because it grabs your attention, doesn’t require any input or effort from you (besides pressing a button) and it is an enjoyable experience.

Tips: Stop being camera-shy and create tutorial or know-how videos about your industry’s business. Film a day with your team or simply create funny videos sharing stories or experiences and share them on your website/blog.

3. Treat your clients with respect – Great customer care

One of the biggest digital marketing trends of 2015 is providing the best customer care for your customers. Establish an open and transparent communication with your users by responding to their feedback in a timely and respectful manner. Respond to their requests or inquiries either via private messages or using social media channels. Stick to your policies and reflect the brand through your customer care.

Tips: for increase transparency, solve all your queries on social channels, so that other customers can get their answers from it and can feel more invested in the company. Always start your messages with “Dear Jane” rather than “Dear Customer” and respond within few hours (maximum 48 hours). And especially, get all your advice from the feedback received, as you want to create a business based  on your customer’s needs. You can add comments or contact form, to make the process even more transparent.

4. Knock at the right doors – know your targeted audience

We live in a world where our social accounts and search engines searches are forming a targeted footprint, extremely quantifiable for marketers. Only social networks and our search engine’s history can create an abundant sketch of our preferences, age, favourite brands, favourite football teams of or singers and so on. Google relies on our extremely valuable search history to adjust future content to our taste. Digital marketers can create Facebook campaign  for an entire group of users, segmented by their origin or interest. Using Google Analytics, digital savvies can discover where are their users coming from or where are they going after they leave your website.

Tips: Use Google AdWords and Google Sense, if you want to boost your searches in Google. In addition, before launching a campaign of Facebook, take a few moments and play around with your audience and define your targets.

5. Social conversion – low-hanging fruit

After you have carefully planned your social media campaigns, don’t forget to measure the results of your initiatives. When it comes to e-commerce and lead generations sites, social conversions offer you the highest opportunity to improve conversions rate and expand on new conversion channels.

Tips: If you want a lucrative social campaign and outstanding social conversions, try to improve your social media strategy: use higher conversion keywords and relevant hashtags for expanding the reach; use visual content for more engagement; use short and concise business updates; create and share worthy blog contents, identify and amplify top worthy content and use a social media friendly structure.

6. Mobile Marketing

If you ever had any doubts about creating a mobile version of your website, now it’s the time to wash it off. Google has released on April 21, the “MobileGheddon”, a new algorithm giving search result priority to “mobile-friendly” sites.

Tips: If you want to kick of some digital marketing trends off your to do list, a mobile version would be the first thing to start with. Creating a mobile version will elevate your position within Google’s mobile search results, bringing your website more traffic and expanding your business. After your website is fully (mobile) optimized, consider using apps such as ShoutOut to send out newsletters directly from your smartphone.

7. New payment methods: adapt or die

Approaching rapidly the advent of EVM credit cards (October 2015), there is a raising need for implementing the new trends when it comes to online payments and e-commerce websites. The main remaining concern is privacy and how can users be entirely protected. In this case, we feel like educating, and coaching customers through the transition is an upcoming digital marketing trend.

Tips: Get an e-commerce theme, if your website is hosted on WordPress, for easy payment execution.  Transforming your WordPress blog into a powerful, easy-to-manage, enterprise quality e-commerce store website takes a lot of work and a great WordPress theme – and getting this done is one of the biggest digital marketing trends. Check here a list with the best e-commerce premium themes for WordPress – perfect for showcasing and selling physical and digital products online.

8. Growth hacking – Marketing and Technology molded together

Let’s not forget about growth hacking, as it was and it will be a digital marketing trend to depend on. First introduced by Sean Ellis in 2010, the term “growth hacker” summarizes in a nutshell the job description of a marketer –  a professional disciplined in prioritizing and testing marketing ideas, and religiously analysing the results, in order to see which tactics worked the best and should be scaled out further.  As a matter of fact, if you are not a growth hacker today, you are not being a good marketer.

Tips: Growth hack is situated at the intersection of technology with marketing, so the best approach of starting to implement this huge digital marketing trend relates to your web page design, email templates, purchase process, social sharing links, website analytics, content creation, search engine optimization, advertising creatives/landing pages, etc. that you can iterate with A/B testing, to continually improve until you find that “Aha Moment” that will lead to rapid, viral and affordable customer growth (as opposed to expensive traditional media buys which most startups can’t afford).  According to Forbes, you can find a more comprehensive list of growth hacking tactics from Jon Yongfook, here.

9. Marketing automation – becomes an “axis mundi”

Marketing automation is nothing new. It is, however, bigger than ever. Marketing automation is now easy and affordable enough for any marketer with a budget to do it. Once upon a not-so-far-away time, the only organizations doing automation were big companies with world-recognized brand names. Now, marketing automation is nearly a requirement for any business that wants to stay on top.
Tips: Choose an easy-to-use software, focus your marketing automation strategy towards customer behaviour, allowing it to become more personalized. Just to reinforced an earlier digital marketing trend, marketing automation companies will continue to find the best ways to make their software more mobile-friendly, especially when mobile marketing revenue is expected is skyrocket in the next few years. And the last pain point when it comes to marketing automation is social media automation. Unlike email marketing automation, when it comes to social media, information needs to be shorter, more concise, and re-active to recent events or industry developments. A mix of real time and automated social media marketing can make for a powerful combination for many businesses.

10. Conversion optimization get the highest grade

If you don’t have CRO on your to do list for 2015, you are leaking money as we speak. Conversion rate optimization is the process of maximizing the number of site visitors who convert or make a purchase. By thoroughly understanding users and split testing changes on a website, marketers can determine what elements of a website or landing page will produce the highest number of conversions. The process is totally worth, because instead of investing high-rocketing budgets in ad placement and organic search,  marketers can instead funnel more of their existing traffic into sales.

Tips: Complete a comprehensive analysis of your strategy before starting with CRO,  the start the great A/B testing process, which can dramatically improve your conversion rates., then focus on the user and let the money come. It sounds easy, but really, it takes a lot of domain knowledge and practice. So, good luck!