Marketing Focus – Understanding Marketing in 2014
For our first marketing focus of the year we’ve been looking at a really interesting report by Vocus on digital marketing for 2014, trends and ideas. The key messages are as follows –
Integration – Integrate digital marketing into your strategic marketing plan using it as one of the tools for getting the message across
Measurement – Make a plan to measure the effectiveness of any new digital method you use and decide if it is worth the investment
Data is king – the most profitable companies are data driven and respond to data to make better decisions, automate processes and respond to customer demand. Try to capture as much data and analyse everything you can to make your company work better and understand your customers.
Stay social – There’s no sign of social media’s popularity fading, they are actually growing, and along with them the opportunities for businesses to interact and build relationships with clients online. Paid for options such as Facebook advertising are growing in popularity as the targeting options are incredible and the marketing spend is easily controlled and measureable.
Invest in quality content – The recommendations are to create content around feeding people’s ego, need for information and emotion to get the best results and feed this into your website, blog and social media. Content generation for online should be integrated with the typical PR function as it can also be used for media outreach if it’s good quality.
New for 2014
Google’s search algorithm has been changed to improve “conversational searches” which understand words in relation to each other to improve results and Facebook search is becoming more important for business. Recommendations are to keep content relevant, fresh and diverse and use multimedia to make things more interesting and score more points in the search engines
Real Time Marketing – this trend is growing with the more effective use of social media to allow switched on marketers to respond to things that are going on there and then and create powerful and viral marketing messages. These can be planned in advance if you know that an event, such as the Olympics or a holiday, is coming up and you can tailor messages around it and make it seem real time, even if it’s been scheduled or at least planned into the workflow. Brainstorm upcoming events or occasions or trends and prepare to see if you can participate in the conversation and reap the rewards.
The rise of marketing automation – If you can correctly analyse data from your customers you can automate messaging relevant to them at the time they are most receptive to it. However implementing this automation is tricky, takes a lot of time to get right and it runs the risk of missing the personal touch. Done correctly it can free up a lot of resources and make personalised marketing more scalable, so this is definitely one to watch.
Targeting using technology – The implantation of smart technology such as Google glasses or smart watches which know where you are and what you’re doing offer the possibility of complete targeting such as offering potential customers a certain meal deal in your restaurant as they enter your area at a certain time of day. I think this kind of marketing is out of reach for most of us for the near future, but a very interesting trend to watch!
Have a great year!!