Our love affair for our smartphones has only just begun. 2015 will be the year that online marketers embrace the small screen or suffer the indignity of being friend-zoned by their clients. Google has indicated that mobile friendliness is now a major criterion for relevance in search results. 2015 will bring more robust mobile-ready websites, full-featured apps, creativity in mobile advertising, and an increasing presence in mobile-based social media interactivity.
Social Media ad spending will increase as businesses of all sizes figure out what the forerunners have known for a long time. Watch for increased competition for eyeballs in the social media sphere, driving either innovative approaches or clumsy, intrusive mistakes resulting in backlash. Those agencies who can ride this trend will come out ahead. The real winners will be the social media providers, unless they lose sight of their long-term goals and go for the quick buck. Internet marketing companies that can humanize their campaigns will also win big, if they can balance their message with respect for the purposes of social media- human to human interaction.
Is Google Content With Your Content?
Of the 93% of B2B marketers who used content marketing this year, 42% showed some kind of measurable effectiveness.*
Follow the money. We believe that as search rankings veer from their usual moorings (PPC, SEO tweaks, back-linking) investment in great content will continue to ascend like a Sherpa up Mt. Everest.
This is where creative, imaginative internet marketing writers and media producers will thrive in their attempts to stand out in a general rising tide of content-heavy competition. Google's guidelines for rating search results are occasionally "leaked," revealing a bit of their criteria for ranking content; some recent ones are:
- Produced by some authority on the topic.
- Consistently new or refreshed
- Cited, referenced or linked to sources
- Supported by a generally positive reputation from reviews, Yelp, Google+, etc.
- Enhanced by sensible design, navigability, ease of use
- Framed by authentic contact and customer service information
- Free from grammatical or syntactical errors, and easy to read
- Part of a consistent editorial "feel" across the entire site
Yes, Google actually uses human "raters" that evaluate search returns as "Vital, Useful, Relevant, Slightly Relevant, or Off-topic."† There are still a few things that artificial intelligence can't do.
Email Marketing Strikes Back
(Rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated)
As SEO gets more sophisticated, smaller businesses will revert to a sure-fire, under-control strategy: email. Smart marketers will add a twist, though. As long as high-quality content is being produced for online search purposes they will figure out how to leverage it for use in emailed form. Watch your inbox for offers of white papers and e-books in 2015. See our blog on high response emails.
Three-Ingredient Marketing Smoothie
As the importance of blogs and well-tended website pages continue to dominate look for marketers to create more delicious blends, adding SEO and Social Media to their smooth and creamy Content. Search visibility will increasingly depend on the deft interplay between SEO tasks like keyword research and the reputation-building tasks of Social Media conversations.
Humanization
Another side-effect of the popularity of Social Media, we're already seeing a trend toward "connecting" with audiences. Consider the old school sales strategies of pure one-size-fits-all persuasion streaming from our TV's radios and print media contrasted with the focus-group and conversation-driven messaging of today. So many long years of advertising-as-persuasion have inured us all to it. We're just tired of being convinced all the time.
Businesses have been given a great gift- being able to respond in public in real time to customers kudos or complaints! You better believe that winners are companies who listen and respond. A happy customer is one that feels listened to, even if their expectations aren't necessarily exceeded.
Farewell to the Banner Ad
Our audiences have developed a healthy skepticism about banner ads. They usually get the same response as the person who fails to cough into their sleeve: "Great, now I'm probably gonna get whatever virus he's got." That will drive more of what's called Native Advertising, a form of content (again!) that is intended to be relevant and helpful to the consumer but without the usual trappings of a traditional ad. Think Hallmark TV specials- an ad for greeting cards with a TV drama attached. Or recipes that call for Brand X butter and Brand X milk. Embedded messages in articles, editorials, links, how-to videos and the like will mark the passing of animated click-bait banners.
What internet marketing trends do you see coming in the new year? We'd love to get your perspectives and insights. Keep on top of it all by checking in regularly with United WebWorks!
*Content Marketing Institute: B2B Content Marketing 2014
† http://searchengineland.com/interview-google-search-quality-rater-108702