Chapter II: The major digital marketing trends

Digital marketing has over the last few years undergone a substantial transformation, becoming an increasingly important medium for creating an online brand experience.

Just like any field that relies on communication technologies, online marketing is rapidly developing towards some directions and departing from others, rendering some practices obsolete. What’s in store for digital marketers in the upcoming year?

Read on to find out what are the major online marketing trends and predictions for 2015.

1. The Rise of Content Marketing

The popularity of content marketing strategies will continue unabated into the upcoming year, which essentially means that marketers will abandon the traditional digital marketing tactics in favor of creating more relevant and inspiring content. Instead of relying on tested solutions, companies will pay more attention to customer experience and curate content in a more emphatic, client-oriented way.

Along will rise budgets allocated to content marketing and the importance of companies that reach out to their customers in writing – B2B companies with blogs are expected to generate 67% more leads per month than those organizations that don’t have blogs. High-quality and relevant content will be key to digital marketing of the future.

2. Augmented Reality & Wearable Technology

Closing the gap between the online and offline experience will be a big step not only for online marketing, but for Internet in general. One of the first possible technological applications meant to combine online and offline are micro-location technologies, in particular Apple’s iBeacon, which has during the last year completely revolutionized the scene and is slowly being introduced into commercial settings.

But that’s not all. Wearable technology will become popular enough for us to see some of the first marketing application of the technology. The Internet of things will create a completely new kind of environment and marketers will have to keep up with its rapid development in order to stay in touch with the changing needs of consumers.

3. Marketing Analytics Will Bloom

Marketers already use dozens of analytics tools in order to see how customers interact with their company’s products or services. The importance of this section of marketing will rise in 2015, when spending for that purpose are expected to rise by 60%.³

Furthermore, we’ll see marketing automation technologies applied more and more often – their use is predicted to grow by 50%. In short, marketing data will become a crucial point in any marketing endeavor and its acquisition will be easier and faster. Consumers will generate a vast amount of detailed information and companies are expected to use specialized software to help them in making sense of the data at hand.

4. More Videos Than Ever

During the last few years, the use of videos for marketing purposes has been steadily growing. Videos are perfect to show how a service or product works in such a way that is impossible to achieve with text or images only. This trend s most likely to continue into 2015, when more and more companies will start creating the so-called ‘explainer videos’ and giving them a prominent role in the user experience tactics.