As we look ahead to the new year, we asked five marketing professionals for their big trends in digital marketing for 2015. Here’s what they came up with:
Uriel Alvarado, chief marketing and public relations officer, Saxo Capital Markets
Consolidation of the semantic web: This year, the most effective marketing campaigns were content driven, multi-channel, personalised and agile. We now have the tools – using cookies, algorithms and programmatic marketing – to run huge automated and personalised campaigns more intelligently. I believe that in 2015 and beyond we will see these tools being further integrated with the internet of things.
However, the web has never been more fragmented, particularly as mobile and app use continues to grow. In 2015, I think we will see new agreements by large web conglomerates looking into ways to re-integrate the web. Could the semantic web be one of the points of the agenda behind Zuckerberg’s internet.org project?
Whatever the outcome, there is currently a window of opportunity for marketers who would like to stay ahead of competition online by investing not only on content but also on building relationship capital, which will be the key factor driving brand strength.
Teresa Arbuckle, marketing director UK and Ireland, Grundig
Content is still king: Recent changes to Google algorithms mean that content is still very much king. However, it is looking at what the content is, where it sits and what it says that is absolutely crucial to driving the success of your business.
Refreshing the content on your website on an almost daily basis is no mean feat, but in today’s online purchasing world it is key to ensure you do not slip from the crucial first page of Google. However, this is not the only, or by any means the most important, route to getting your brand noticed. In a world of social media, optimising what you say and communicate through your owned channels is equally important.
Consumers are more savvy to brand messaging than ever before and they are very vocal about brands that push self-serving content on them all the time. In order to build a real relationship with your customers online, you need to be offering them content of real value to them, be that a cool video or offers not available to the general public. It is not search engine optimisation (SEO) versus social media optimisation (SMO), but both working in tandem that lead to success.
Allan Blair, head of strategy, Tribal Worldwide, London
Everthing will be personalised: Brands have finally figured out how to use big data and I predict that personalisation will be the marketing buzzword of 2015. Anything and everything that can be personalised in 2015 will be.
Consumers will be offered the opportunity to create, share and buy personalised products and services, and brands will be using the big data they have been collecting on their customers to then serve customers relevant individual content wherever they are in their user journey (website, customer relationship management (CRM), social and in-store).
Every brand will be clamouring to do this and by the end of the year we will be asking questions about brand intrusion (is it creepy) and brand consistency (does it lead to fragmented brand messaging).
Lisa Thomas, CEO, M&C Saatchi Group
Stop thinking of digital as separate to marketing: Digital now accounts for over half the media spend in the UK. I think that 2015 will be the year that the industry prepares itself to stop talking about it as something special and start using it with an imagination and scale that we haven’t seen before. Don’t sensationalise it, don’t compartmentalise it and the world of digital will evolve from being a bolt-on to the focus of any decent marketing campaign. In summary, I hope we all stop thinking of digital as separate to marketing, and start seeing the future of marketing as one and the same as the future of digital, with no distinction made.
Charles Wells, chief marketing officer, JustGiving
Treat customers as individuals: No more segments. Marketers have dined out for years on segmentation: message A goes to segment A etc. Marketing now has the ability to understand the behaviour of individual users in much more detail thanks to the explosion in data from social and mobile. 2015 will be the year where we stop insulting our customers by entrapping them in a segment and start treating them like an individual. This means personalised experiences, notifications rather than email and showing people what their friends are doing.
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