Key Digital Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2014!

As the world is aggressively heading towards Digitization which has entrenched foothold in each and every domain, the world of Marketing and Communication cannot remain an exception. This is one of the core sphere which is most disrupted and impacted by the tornado of Digitization.

WE Studio D ASIA-PACIFIC has come up with an insightful report that aims to depict the major Digital trends the world will witness on arena of Marketing and Communication in India and across Asia Pacific.

The key highlights of the report are:-

• .Data mining and data analytics will drive brand communications and content marketing.

•  Rich content embedded with creativity, context and target segments will fuel the growth of communication and story-telling.

•  Customer engagement with brands will be measured by a single, integrated and enhanced model of ROI besides existing KPIs.

•  With the deep penetration of mobile and smartphones, brands will engage customers, deliver message and content belligerently via IMs like WhatsApp and WeChat.

•  “Social care” will be at the heart and core of the organization. With the proliferation of big data and predictive analysis modelling, brands will address the customer issues and agendas in real-time environmentz

•  The use of virtually all channels and media of communication will be seen.

•  The world will witness brand communication as the major differentiating factor that will drive the entire business and commerce.

•  Trend towards hybrid organizational structure/ hybrid teams in Marketing and Communication domains in particular will be witnessed.

The brisk emergence of the always connected consumer, places new demands on marketers! Christmas is upon us & the mad dash towards the end of the year holidays has begun. I will leave it to experts to ponder on how 2013 was meaningful for business, small & large.

I would rather take a look at what to expect in 2014 in digital marketing. For one thing, I believe most (not all) are now beginning to understand the impact social media can have on their business. Before I proceed I would like to start with the saying -  “Don’t wait to be perfect, just start”, after all Brands can afford to be “flawsome”.

An Identity based Eco-System

We as humans, have always had a need to express ourselves. By that very expression we further our identity. Awesomely smart companies like Facebook (Timeline), Amazon (Personalized Recommendations) are already taking advantage to what I am calling as an Identity based Eco-System.

The ever growing Digital world of tomorrow be it business, or consumer will revolve around individual identity .The one’s(compactness) who take advantage of this trend will create ways to harness the concept that showcasing our identity is the most human & primary of our desiers.

CCA (Content Curation & Aggregation )

Remember the Hollywood movie You've Got Mail? You can never re-create it. Why? No one is excited to receive an e-mail anymore!! We have moved on from being an information hungry society, to an information overload society.

But we do need information – New Information every single day!! That is the main reason we see the rise of website’s such as Quora, Pinterest, List.ly, Visual.ly to name a few. Pinterest is basically nothing but an organization system for images that already exists on the web, but we need that system for aggregation, it’s a full on success.

VIDEO = Device Agnostic

Do you frankly remember the last time you said – “ I am watching a video on the television”, now you must be watching them on your phone,  tablet, smart phone. Video continues to become device agnostic! Now from a business point of view Online Video will continue to play a bigger role in the digital space .

Multi-Screen Revolution

Super bowl, the most amazing & innovative event, actually defined the multi-screen revolution perfectly. While people watched the game on their TV, they were checking on the office mails on the computer, tweeting about the game on their tablets and smart phone’s & texting their friend’s at the same time. The number of screens we use will only increase on time.

Now when I say screen, I am not referring to a glass solid thingy, even Google glass for that matter qualifies. So any surface you can interact with can be considered as a screen. Hence looking for innovations in advertising as the number of screens increase will grow drastically.

Social Literacy is a Must

Social Literacy will be a mandate by companies when considering candidates for any position. It would expand beyond the understanding of the global available social platforms to make the vast digital landscape a vital part of your professional repertoire.

As a Skill Set , Social literacy can be further segmented into 2 parts- organizational and Personal.On the Organizational level – In the thought of strategy , the sheer ability to aggregate and understand multiple points of data for decision making and Hardcore authentication will be required. On the Personal Level- people will/should know how to create content , curate relevant information (cause we love Information as human’s), And to connect people and resources in the best possible manner.

A Picture is worth a 1000 words ( I think 1000 is a bit too less) 

The search giant Google, recently released - Authorship, allowing authors to link content they publish on a specific domain to their Google Plus page and have their picture appear in the search results.

So If you’re blogging, you need to be using this technique as it maximizes visibility, increases click-through rates and provides a competitive advantage.

• The huge growth of Instagram and Pinterest over the past years had further reinforced the fact that pictures are more engaging. The increased use of info-graphics provides more proof that image-based content is KEY!!

• Articles and blogs with well-placed images that strategically break up text guarantee increased views. Not only is an image good for increasing interaction, Boom !!It also increases your organic visibility by using relevant naming conventions alongside the image.

• Take out: If you’re blogging, use Google Authorship and break up your text to hopefully reduce your word count. In Addition to this Google also uses ‘trust’ as a key metric when ranking pages for SEO, making Authorship even more important. When thinking about social media, don’t forget to target image-based sites.

Location-based Marketing

• Advanced marketers have been communicating with customers based on their location for years, more recently via checking in on Foursquare or Facebook, and previously via proximity technologies such as Bluetooth.Public Wi-fi can be the next level , provided we have that level of internet penetration in our country!!

• Consumers don’t have to check in for marketers to target them, we can do so based on their location via GPS. Google does this extremely effectively via Ad Words. Radius targeting allows you to target your advert to customers within a certain distance from your business.

• Apple the innovation kings have taken this a stage further with iBeacon, an ‘indoor positioning system’ enabling an advertiser to tailor messaging to a customer based on where they are in your shop, office, stadium etc. The options nevertheless are totally endless, from informing customers in which aisle to find a product to providing navigational advice to their seat in auditorium, office .

• The real power is when you overlay this technology with demographic and customer information. Not only do we now know where this customer is but we know who they are and what they like, so we can target them more efficiently.

Love thy Short

If you want to connect with audiences, especially the YOUTH, create engaging and bite-sized stories, heck we all know that.

The growth of Pinterest & its crisp and simple you will prove people want simple.Google understood this before anyone else  is there a homepage less cluttered or more uncomplicated than Google’s?

In the year 2014, marketers must be able to tell their story as succinctly as possible.Now , as consumption of video on mobile devices continues to grow in 2014, short video storytelling will become paramount. Twitter’s Vine service, which allows users to upload 6.5-7 seconds of video, boasts just under 14 million registered users and has featured as the Apple app store’s most downloaded app.

This was my short (not so short) take on the key trends in digital marketing for the coming year.