Digital Marketing has over the last few years undergone a substantial transformation, becoming an increasingly important medium for creating an online brand experience.
Just like any field that relies on communication technologies, online marketing is rapidly developing towards some directions and departing from others, rendering some practices obsolete. What’s in store for digital marketers in the upcoming year? Read on to find out what are the major online marketing trends and predictions for 2015.
1. The Rise of Content Marketing
The popularity of content marketing strategies will continue unabated into the upcoming year, which essentially means that marketers will abandon the traditional digital marketing tactics in favor of creating more relevant and inspiring content. Instead of relying on tested solutions, companies will pay more attention to customer experience and curate content in a more emphatic, client-oriented way. .
2. Augmented Reality & Wearable Technology
Closing the gap between the online and offline experience will be a big step not only for online marketing, but for Internet in general. One of the first possible technological applications meant to combine online and offline are micro-location technologies, in particular Apple’s iBeacon, which has during the last year completely revolutionized the scene and is slowly being introduced into commercial settings.
3. More Videos Than Ever
During the last few years, the use of videos for marketing purposes has been steadily growing. Videos are perfect to show how a service or product works in such a way that is impossible to achieve with text or images only. This trend s most likely to continue into 2015, when more and more companies will start creating the so-called ‘explainer videos’ and giving them a prominent role in the user experience tactics.
4. Personalized Means Better
Marketers want users to interact with their content, and what better way to achieve that than through providing something relevant? By offering personalized content during the last year, companies were able to increase the number of sales, lower the costs of operation, inspire users to stay longer on their websites and foster customer satisfaction. Personalization is expected to become a widely adopted practice in 2015, leading to the growth of 1-to-1 marketing.
5. Hyper-Segmentation and Micro Targeting
Lots of people use various websites and leave a whole wealth of data on the web – Facebook and Twitter can act as valuable repositories of data about their audience. Access to this information will allow marketers to target niche audience sizes and the use targeted advertising more efficiently than ever.
In general, there’s a fair amount of social acceptance for the use of data for online advertising – perhaps more than you would expect, since only 47% of consumers opposed a law that limited the use of data for this purpose. Targeted ads are considered twice as effective as non-targeted ones and one study demonstrated that retargeted display ad will inspire 1000% more people to search for this product! No wonder that targeting strategies are expected to dynamically rise in 2015.