trendsOnline Marketing Trends for 2015

Looking ahead to 2015, marketers prepare for the upcoming trends. With digital marketing constantly changing, some of the Online Marketing Trends for 2015 we will be taking a close look at are:

Quality Content Continues to Evolve

Google is expected to continue releasing updates that rank websites with quality content higher in the search results because it generally provides a better user experience.

Personalization Will Thrive

Sending email to random email addresses is out. It’s ineffective and will only result in sitting in the penalty box of banned email senders. Personalization is in. Personalizing your email marketing strategies by tailoring email blasts to specific lists is highly effective.

Similarly on social media, he who dies with the most friends doesn’t win. It’s all about the engagement – connecting with an audience who will benefit from content on social leads to increased engagement (likes, comments, shares, retweets etc.) Focus will shift towards establishing the right audience, connecting with them on a personal level with content they will engage with and is going to benefit.

Shorter Attention Spans Will Continue to Rule

Nobody wants to sit and read content on a website. Content rich websites are still necessary and great for the search engines, but as the internet attention span continues to decrease, micro-blogging (social updates), images and video will help grab that attention and entice users to read the small updates, look at a picture or watch a video to become educated resulting in spending more time on a content rich website.

Continued Interconnection of Content, Social, and SEO

We predicted this at the beginning of 2014, and it has come a long way in this one year alone. Business owners are starting to understand that SEO alone isn’t going to be as effective when it comes to people finding their website. More pages going up every day and the search engine results spots remain the same. Optimize your site and intentionally drive traffic.

Mobile Search Surpasses Desktop Search

Mobile search will surpass desktop/laptop search by the end of 2015 according to Marketing Land.

2015 will see a shift towards building a combined online presence that is suitable for both desktop and mobile users. Keep mobile user-experience in mind when developing next year’s marketing plan. Mobile experience will be a key ranking factor for mobile searches, and if the user-experience is lacking, so will the rankings.

Social Media Becomes a Pay-to-Play Environment

2015 will continue to see the free Social Media networks being used, but the big players are showing less and less of your content to your audience. It is important to keep in mind that paying for social advertising or even “boosting” some posts on Facebook is still significantly less expensive than the dollars that used to be spent on Yellow Page advertising.

The biggest reasons that Social Media, pay to play has become the norm is simple, profit and overcrowding, neither can be controlled by businesses. Considering that greater than 85% of businesses will use social media in 2014, the amount of content being pushed to the audience has grown significantly. With companies like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter going “public” they are looking for the value proposition to continue to add profit to their bottom line.