One great advantage of influencer marketing is that it is regarded as being more authentic than direct brand marketing. According to Rebecca McCuiston, Senior Vice President of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, brands must make efforts to find authentic and credible personalities who can promote campaigns, thereby naturally supporting the product and the influencer.
On that note, here are some changes we might see in digital marketing 2015.
- Content Quality is set to Increase
It is believed that there will be a big shift in media ownership, led by brands. As pointed out by Doug Kessler, (Co-founder of B2B agency Velocity), several media sites of the world will soon be owned by big brands. As more brands start owning media sites, there will be more room and more budgets for content marketing. This will obviously lead to continuously improving content quality.
“Content is king” and it seems as though this theory would remain to be so, for the next few years. If you want to be future-proof with your marketing strategies, you may not ignore the power of content marketing.
- More focus on your audience and Communities
As Neil Patel of KISSmetrics predicts, marketing strategies in 2015 will be more focused on specific people and communities. Brands and companies have realized the importance and advantages of paying attention to community-focused marketing. Most marketers are aware of the existence of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc., but few organizations are building their own communities. Therefore, by having your own community you can stand out, be unique, and grab attention better.
It is not too late to do great things. Do your homework today and learn the art of community-based social marketing. The least it can offer you is product recognition. Your audience will relate your product or service with their daily lives and activities and you never know when or who could turn out to be your prospective customer.
- The most successful content marketing strategy will be story telling
Michael Brenner, Head of strategy at NewsCred, predicts that the present content marketing strategies will fall apart and give way to storytelling. In other words, storytelling will be the best way to grab people’s attention. Somehow, the trend has shifted towards listening to other’s experience, especially the famous ones who have either witnessed grand success or failed due to wrong business moves.
Either way, people today are interested in listening to how previous experiences, or business moves have succeeded or failed to make an impact in the competitive market today. And why not? If you can achieve success by learning from the achievements or mistakes of your predecessor, there’s nothing like it. Remember, brand marketing by storytelling is an art that needs to be mastered. Do not take it easy.
- Mobile devices will continue to dominate
This is one factor that has already set a new trend. Hanna Andrzejewska, Marketing Head at GetResponse, believes mobile devices are set to dominate even more in 2015. Studies show that more than 60% of emails are first checked on mobile devices. There is still a massive space for brand marketers to understand the behavior of mobile users. There is no denying the fact that usage of smartphones is growing rapidly and dominating the marketing sector.
Tom De Spiegelaere, founder, Mango Matter Media suggests, “You will be doing a world of good to yourself by thoroughly learning the different marketing metrics like 1) what mobile devices most customers use and 2) the time when it is most used along with many other details.” There are several mobile marketing tutorials online for you to master the latest in mobile marketing.
- Brands will not choose customers; it will be the other way around
Jasmine Sandler, the popular digital marketing strategist, suggests that brands will be better off developing or implementing business strategies which support organic customer relationships. Gone are the days of repurposing old corporate and marketing communications. To be more precise, the majority of existing content turns out to be very old and sometimes inferior. To make it worse, these content materials are generally created by marketers themselves, having their own point of view. The focus here is more on how to sell and not what they understand about a brand.
Consider whether you are turning your content marketing position into content marketing poison. Think, plan, and create ideas with the customer experience in mind. Repurposing content may sound great, but it can also be compared to building a boat with rotted wood! Yes, that’s how bad it is.
As we head into 2015, it is important to realize that content marketing or social media marketing is more crowded today than it has ever been. Influencer marketing further emphasizes the importance of working for your customers or audience. The above points are the top five predictions for content marketers in 2015. It would be interesting to see what other changes come across.