Digital Marketing 2015: 4 Trends To Capitalize On

The main predictable online marketing trend for 2015 and ongoing years is the increased importance of content marketing and its distribution through cross-channel social platforms. Content strategy should be first in your online marketing strategy as all other trends that will be listed here lean on its quality pillars.Let’s face and follow them today in order to earn some benefits tomorrow.

Cross-Device Attribution Revolution

In 2014, Internet usage on PCs has been significantly decreased because it is being exceeded by mobile devices usage. According to Search Engine Watch, 99,5 % of consumers use tablets and smartphones  to access content/information and 15% of consumers use mobile devices to purchase.

This huge shift from desktop to mobile experiences will certainly affect your digital marketing strategy to a greater extent in 2015. As Google constantly updates its mobile marketing best practices and is adding mobile-friendly ranking factors to its algorithm, you should have already optimized your website for mobile device usage in order to provide a mobile-friendly user experience. As soon as people access your site across multiple devices like tablets, smartphones, laptops and PC without such design and SEO problems like zooming your content, consuming page load time, endless scrolling content and difficult-to-touch buttons, you will see your conversion rate improvement. For comprehensive mobile optimization, check out the WebCEO Website Audit tool.

Another issue is with cross-device campaign tracking. It is critically important to identify online user behavior across different devices and track an individual’s journey to his or her final destination which is conversion. While they are on desktops, it is easy to track logged-in users because of cookies, but on mobile devices cookies don’t work. Data on cross-device advertising is helpful for user retention (retargeting). User devices data is partially displayed in Google Analytics and your CRM system. The Facebook Atlas Ad Platform with its cross-device reporting feature can help with this issue and help marketers track and reach the right audience across various platforms and devices.

Tip: It is critical to measure your cross-device marketing success and one of the things that can point to the increase or decrease of your success is your mobile results rank tracking.

Retargeting Retention

Retargeting has significantly evolved in the last few years. It started as site ad retargeting, to catch the attention of people who had visited your site before, and evolved into powerful display, search, social, mobile and video retargeting strategies which help marketers to reach lost and new potential customers on multiple platforms and at different scales. According to eMarketer.com, 88% of polled U.S marketers used retargeting and 56% were planning to run it in the next 12 months. Google AdWords and Facebook Ads are one of the most powerful platforms for retargeting ad campaigns. Discover more about effective retargeting with WebCEO’s Online SEO tools.

Retargeting has a lot of positive benefits:

1. It builds the familiarity and trust of new visitors to your websites that makes them more likely to buy a product.
2. It helps to retain existing customers and keep your brand at the top of their minds
3. The conversion rate of the companies that use retargeting campaigns is more likely to increase to 50-60% among retargeted consumers.
4. Improvement of your ROI

Tip: Be careful while running retargeting campaigns. Be sure to monitor a campaign’s progress. Put in a frequency cap in order to limit the number of ads per month for one user and use a kind of “shutoff” in order to switch off ads to those of your retargeted users who have already been converted (if you want to do this).

Location-Focused Online Marketing Concentration

4 of 5 searchers land on search engines to look for information about local business, services or products. Local searchers are more likely to convert, so if your business is targeted to some local markets, you should think global, but act local. Location-focused marketing should include both offline and online strategies. Pay attention to local-specific values, traditions, as well as the cultural and social identity of consumers. The localization of your online marketing strategy focuses on personalization which leads to high consumer engagement and conversions. Consumers want to be listened to and understood by international brands. The Google Pigeon Update rollout seriously affected  global search results. Since then local search results are in great favor by Google. Make sure you have properly optimized your online business for specific locations.

Tip: Help Google to spot and highlight your website local “beacons” that you can properly place with the help of the WebCEO Post-Pigeon Local SEO Guide.

Video Marketing Augmentation

Video Marketing has evolved from a visual part of your content strategy into a full-fledged type of online marketing. It is now one of the most powerful forms of online advertising that can perfectly serve as educational, entertainment, and engagement tool. The future of video ads as one of the key parts of any good online promotional strategy, can be easily predicted by looking at convincing statistics proclaiming that by 2017, online video will account for 70% of consumer Internet traffic. You will need to focus on the creation of various formats of video content and their cross-platform distribution and social media promotion. Still yet, the format and the length of your video content will depend on the industry niche, size and nature of your product or service.  One of the most popular formats is that of an explainer video that is  under 2 minutes in length or an animated video made to explain the product or service in a most entertaining and effective way. A good format helps to reduce the bounce rate on your home page and on promotional landing pages, and you will see an increase in the click-through-rate of external video-sharing platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Vine, etc. Have a look at a Google Trends report of interest over time for an “explainer video.”

Tip: Learn from some popular brands that won from video marketing in the current year and be sure to follow fast-growing digital trends like this in 2015.

The next year will not be easy for digital marketers and business owners, because the online world is turning into a “rabbit hole” with multiple digital “tunnels” that can misguide you on the way to success. Be sure to follow our predicted route so you won’t get lost.