Our Top 5 Content Marketing Predictions for 2015

Don’t copy and paste your  2014 digital marketing plans into 2015 just yet.  With the new year right around the corner and possibly a new marketing budget to plan, it’s important to take note of the digital marketing trends and predictions coming up in 2015.  Marketing is always in a state of change so we’ve compiled a list of our top 5 digital marketing predictions for 2015:

1. Creating F#!*%#$ Awesome Content Will Still Be a Top Priority

That’s right, creating f#!*%#$ awesome content is still a priority for content marketers in 2015.  With more and more consumers opting to personalize their digital lives, and companies like Google and Facebook optimizing the user experience, creating solid, helpful content that your customers will seek out and find useful is crucial to your company.  Creating organic content also builds trust with customers and a loyal following.  Educating a target audience through your content will now become one of the top selling points for many brands.

2. Email Will Become More Social

As Facebook makes it more difficult to get your business posts seen on users feeds due to their new algorithm that will reduce overly promotional material, marketers will be using alternative ways to amplify their posts.  Email will undoubtedly become more social and will continue to grow with the added need for social channel alternatives with the growing restrictions.  Social channels implemented in emails, i.e. Youtube videos, tweets, instagram photos, blog posts will be utilized along with user generated content from social platforms. Promoting #hashtags and social content surrounding hashtags as email strategies will also grow substantially.

3. Everything Will Need to be Mobile Friendly

As we mentioned in our blog post on creating remarkable content, 50% of all email is opened on mobile devices, and by 2019 there will be 5.6 billion smartphone subscriptions.  Mobile traffic will continue to grow exponentially.  It will no longer be an option for companies to be mobile responsive but will be a necessity because consumers will expect this.  This is a non negotiable for digital marketers in 2015.

4. The Internet Will Become More Human

Google and Facebook’s new push to improve the user experience on their platforms will consequently push businesses to focus on the human experience rather than the sales experience online.  Digital marketers will need to perfect the customer experience by communicating with users in a less formal, corporate or robotic way.  Some options to improve the “human” experience online is to create an easy to use UI, localize the user experience on websites, personalize emails, personalize websites by making them more social by linking to the company’s social site and by adding sharing capabilities.

5. Data Driven Marketing Will Replace Creative Marketing

Don’t get us wrong, creativity is here to stay and is crucial to any marketing campaign.  But before marketers had the massive amounts of data that our technology driven age has bestowed upon us, marketing mainly revolved around making a creative advertising campaign with little to know statistical forethought.  Now, because digital marketers have the ability to capture massive amounts of data related to online behavior, including sales and purchase history, search activity, site interactions, etc. they can now target all marketing campaigns to a specific segment based off of the data collected and the proven market strategy.  From generalization to personalization, data driven marketing will move the needle to allow marketers to be more in tuned with very niche markets in order to prove the ROI.