What can small businesses expect of 2015 in the digital marketing industry?
Whether 2014 was the best year of your life, or the worst, it’s coming to an end. Rather than looking back on the year just gone, it’s important for us to look forward and focus on what could be in store for small businesses in 2015. Here are 5 digital marketing trends that I expect from the new year.
Social Proof
Social proof is essentially the idea that humans naturally conform to the actions of others which is becoming increasingly prevalent in marketing. This is consistently true with the likes of user-reviews and subscriber counts influencing your decisions.
Images
Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest.. all on the rise. We are becoming more and more used to the idea of images rather than text and the stats say so – posts with imagery get statistically more engagement than those without. I have written a piece on the use of images on Twitter, and the benefits of doing so, if you would like further detail on this click here.
Using images with the appropriate titles, tags and annotations can be very useful for SEO purposes, aiding people in finding your content via search engines.
Devices
You will have noticed the surge in use of mobile devices – Two thirds of people in the UK and America have smartphones. We don’t expect this to lessen in 2015, either. This is important to you because it makes the need for mobile optimised websites far more important.
Data
With the likes of google analytics and other free tools, its becoming increasingly more simple for us to track our actions online. There is a huge amount of data available for you to see what campaigns are increasing traffic and which ones are a waste of time.
Online Paid Media
I appreciate I have spoken about the effectiveness of “Social Proof” marketing, but that doesn’t make online paid media any less effective. It is particularly important when increasing awareness of your business and generating a buzz. Use the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn to advertise your business to masses of people – make sure you are advertising to the right people, though.
If you would like any further help in your digital marketing for the new year, make sure you get in touch.
