As the new year approaches, companies are thinking about how to allocate their marketing budget in consideration of digital shifts that will affect all industries in 2015. To the consumer, digital space will become more personal and anticipatory. To the marketer, digital space will become more data-driven, interconnected, and malleable in real-time.
Keeping an eye on digital marketing’s evolution will be critical to harnessing the capabilities of big data and pretargeting next year. Read on to learn about the 4 most impactful shifts you can expect to see in 2015.
Conversion Tunnel will be replaced by Customer Decision Journey.
As marketing channels become increasingly connected, multi-channel attribution modeling will give marketers a clearer understanding of how customers engage with brands before conversion. McKinsey and Company predicts that firms will be able to track a buyer’s historical decision journey through several data points from the time they saw an ad, visited the website, liked on Facebook, engaged with a seller and became a customer. Big data linkage will give companies greater insight into the motivations and needs of consumers, allowing companies to anticipate the next moves of individual customers.
Lean content will elbow out blockbuster content.
As Google continues to connect long-tail search queries, companies will get better at consolidating their site’s pages and longer, in-depth content will become more of a trend. Google predicts that “lean, niche content” will proliferate and broad commercial content will become less effective. Content geared towards educating the audience will also become a key selling point in all industries.
Mobile will become a fundamental aspect of every marketing campaign.
According to Ovum, one billion people will use mobile as their only form of internet in 2015. Wearables synched to mobile phones will continue to gain popularity and all companies will focus on optimizing content across channels to create a consistent experience. Even B2B manufacturers will get on board with digital medical marketing services, meaning we can expect to see more cross-platform campaigns with content-rich video and instructions.
Big data will create hyper-targeted messages.
Next year sites will use cutting-edge tracking devices and predictive analytics focused more on conversion rates than website traffic. Pretargeting capabilities will allow advertising to be customized in real-time through context-aware apps and prediction apps. Text message ad campaigns and customized reminders will turn mobile phones into even more reliable personal assistants, telling consumers what they want and need before they even realize it.
