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6 Digital Marketing Trends to Look Out for in 2015

More so than traditional marketing and advertising, digital marketing undergoes constant change.  As new technology, algorithms, trends, platforms and ideas emerge, the marketplace must adapt and attempt to abandon outdated digital tactics due to the expiration of use they were unable to overcome.  With a new year coming, you want to make sure you stay ahead of the game.  In this blog, we want to explore some of the anticipated digital marketing trends that are on the horizon at the helm of 2015.

One of the most common “big picture” ideas that will be popular in 2015 is consistency.  Consumers are searching for a consistent brand experience across all platforms, as well as offline.  Many business owners and digital marketers lack the real world perception of the consumers that use their brand, and they fail to adapt their digital visibility due to complacency and an indifference to actually serve their consumers outside of their storefront, service or product.  Let’s explore some of the trends that should be embraced in 2015 in order for businesses and marketers to best serve their consumers.

1. Content Variety.

Right now, if you ask a business owner or marketer how they would define digital content, many of them would answer with “blog.” The truth of the matter is that content has begun to grow far beyond blogs, and your consumers are searching for a variety of content.  You will need to adapt the content you’re generating for all of the different marketing channels: graphics, videos, deep content pages, infographics, etc.

2. Brand Humanization.

Right now, business owners and marketers lack the realization of their real audience, which is humans.  With search engines rewarding social, engaging behavior, brands will be forced to abandon their checklist of technical optimization tasks, and start to adjust their digital marketing strategy to accommodate actual humans.  Market research and customized digital campaigns will become commonplace.

3. Channel Connectivity.

While you may see that SEO, social media, content marketing, web design, and analysis are all different departments within a digital marketing company now, this will change as all of the channels will focus on overall customer experience.  Creativity and collaboration will be prioritized and utilized through every member of a digital marketing team.

“2015 will be the year that companies start to pay attention to multi-channel attribution modeling.  Historically, attribution modeling has been a rarely touched topic in most companies due to the difficulty measuring and understanding the full conversion path.  But with more and more interconnectivity between ad networks and advanced measurement capabilities, marketers are close to being able to get a clearer picture of how customers interact with their brand before converting,” says Soso Sazesh, Founder of Growth Pilots.

4. Responsive Web Design.

In 2014, websites were being adapted for mobile through the creation of mobile websites, a truncated version of a full desktop site with the areas of the website most often visited available to the user.  Taking a step further than that, website designs are being built to be responsive, meaning that a website can respond to any individual device it’s being brought up on.  So, a single web design will be able to fit within the confinements of the screen (with slight modifications, of course) onto a Galaxy Note II, iPhone 6, iPad Mini, iMac, PC, Microsoft Surface, and along with a variety of other devices.  Responsive web design is tricky because it takes the eye of a marketer, the eye of an engineer and the eye of a designer to make it work for the devices and the consumers, while still accomplishing its objective.

5. No More Google Plus.

This is definitely not set in stone, but with the lack of active users on Google Plus, it would make sense if 2015 were the year that Google Plus met its ultimate demise.  The real question will be: how will that affect the current organic visibility of businesses that rely heavily on that social network?  That remains to be seen.

6. Late Adopters of Digital Marketing Will Wake Up.

Business owners and other late adopters will finally make themselves privy to the fact that digital marketing is integral to their marketing efforts.  The reality is that everyone is online, and they are using search engines, social media platforms, review websites, directories and other means to search for products and services, and denying that digital marketing is necessary to reach your customers will serve as an extreme detriment.

Looking forward to the new year, what digital marketing trends do you think are going to be popular in 2015?  Do you think a new social media network like Ello will catch on? Do you think legislation, such as net neutrality, can affect the outcome of digital marketing efforts in 2015?

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