Combined, these
trends should make for huge marketing advantages for our companies, and a
chance to grow ourselves, as marketers.
1. Omni-channel advantage. This past year we saw
huge developments in mobile analytics and mobile marketing, which
combines in 2014, enabling us to take advantage of omni-channel
marketing.This year, entrepreneurs and marketers need to go beyond just
responsive web design and creating supplementary mobile apps to ask
ourselves: how are our companies meeting the mobile challenge?
2. Smart objects take over. By now, you've likely heard about the Internet of Things
but are you participating as a consumer or a marketer? As business
managers, we should keep an eye on how these smart objects change the
consumer's expectations around user experience and engagement.
As new gadgets and technologies emerge this year, there will be new
ways to leverage these smart objects in our marketing campaigns and more
effectively reach our audiences.
3. Content marketing continues to explode. We spent
the last year getting our company onboard with inbound marketing and
content creation as the way to grow our businesses. From that we saw new
tools built, new communities created and new resources emerge to help
us make our case.
This next year will bring the solidification of this new arena through things like better content analytics and measurement, new job titles
such as chief content officer, and new forms of content grow in
popularity. I, for one, am most excited to see content marketing bring
beautiful, original, inspiring stories to the masses.
4. Paid organic social amplification. This sounds
like jargon, I know. But, finally, paid and organic marketing meet, fall
in love, and have the most beautiful little baby: paid organic social
amplification.
This year, marketers will turn their efforts and budgets toward paid
marketing on social platforms. Twitter advertising, Facebook
advertising, LinkedIn advertising are prime with readership and
opportunity for us to meet our next customers. Newer platforms such as
Pinterest. Google+ and Instagram will continue to open new ways for us
to amplify our content in less intrusive ways to meet customer needs.
It's like peanut butter and jelly. It just works. If you aren't testing this out yet, jump on in there.
5. Influencer marketing is now part of your job.
Rarely do I see a new channel sweep in, go mainstream, and become part
of every marketer's job. I would say these past few years we've seen the
rise of social media, and then the mainstream adoption of it and now
from that we are left with a huge opportunity to leverage influencer
marketing. This year will bring teams dedicated to social outreach,
outlandish influencer campaigns and -- dare I say it -- a turn toward
offline. (Gasp!)
Marketers are now returning back to "thank you" gifts, hand written
notes and tangibles to catch an influencers eye and build a
relationship. We will see more of that in the coming year.
6. Visual web domination continues. I mentioned this in my prediction last year but beautiful design continues to flourish. Today's consumer expects delightful and stunning experiences. Marketers need to raise the bar
on their site experiences, product packaging, branding and user
experience. No longer will functional design get a passing grade, now we
must be functional, innovative and memorable.
How can you message your story visually? We must jump on to photo and
video marketing and embrace the power it has to persuade and impress
our communities. Design thinking is no longer optional -- it's a market
advantage.
7. Loyalty marketing takes center stage. In one
calendar year we've seen the biggest brands in the world announce their
key focus is customer loyalty, we've seen loyalty teams pop up and
marketers have scrambled to understand customer loyalty. We've seen a
new type of loyalty arise, called reciprocal loyalty,
in which not only are customers loyal to a brand through advocacy and
brand support, but the brand is also investing back into the customer
through rewards, personalized experiences and customer service.
8. Big data personalization. In three short years big data took over. Now that we understand its importance and have tools like Tableau available to us to democratize big data, marketers will begin leveraging these insights for hyper-targeting and personalization.
Things like cohort marketing (the ability to break your audience into
like-minded segments), behavioral targeting (targeting based on
customer actions) and sequencing (the ordering of campaigns to have the
biggest impact) will be critical to your marketing campaign success. No
more spray and pray marketing -- big data has brought us the insights we
needed to reach the right person at the right time with the right
message. Marketing euphoria, unlocked.
9. Snippet storytelling. This year marketers will be
challenged to take image and video marketing and tell beautiful stories
in snippet form. Concise messaging, consistent branding and emotional
content will be laced in everything we do. We will be expected to share a
story faster and make that story digestible in emotion-provoking ways.
The copywriters, brand leads, and video ninja on your team will
become your best friends. What will come of it? A flood of brilliant
stories told in new mediums.
10. Rise of growth teams focused on innovation. This
is the trend I'm looking forward to most. The biggest brands have
growth teams and the rest of us are following suit. These teams are
dedicated to innovation, rethinking protocol and growing new areas of
the business. They are cross-departmental and given the resources to
make a huge impact in a short amount of time. Marketers will be the
nucleus of these teams, if not the leaders, given our performance-driven
and creative experiences. Companies will continue to break the
traditional marketing team structure and empower growth marketers to
think big and, ultimately, win big.
