{"id":29862,"date":"2013-12-02T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/?p=29862"},"modified":"2014-11-28T10:47:57","modified_gmt":"2014-11-28T10:47:57","slug":"marketing-trends-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/managing-digital-marketing\/marketing-innovation\/marketing-trends-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing Trends for 2014 and into 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

22 Digital Marketing techniques that demand attention<\/h2>\n

Update:<\/strong>\u00a0I update this post annually with a new poll on the techniques that readers think is important. You can see the latest poll in this post on Digital Marketing Trends for 2015<\/a>\u00a0- in the article I have also covered what I see as 30 of the top tools for managing and optimising digital marketing in 2015.<\/p>\n

Many of the trends I\u00a0identified below will remain key digital marketing activities in 2015.<\/p>\n

Each year, I review the latest trends in Digital Marketing to help define digital technologies and marketing techniques which will give options for companies to grow their businesses. In 2013 we reviewed top-level digital marketing trends<\/a>, asking which trends will give the greatest commercial benefits, this year I drill down to the next level to give more specific practical recommendations to increase effectiveness.<\/p>\n

What are the major trends in digital marketing for the year ahead?<\/h3>\n

To help define this we repeated our informal poll this year asking Smart Insights readers:<\/p>\n

Please select ONE area of marketing which you believe will give you the greatest commercial benefits in the year ahead. In the poll, please select the single most important trend based on that which you think will make the biggest commercial difference to leads or sales in your company, or a typical client if you are an agency or a consultant. Thank you!<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The results are below and show a familiar patterns with same 3 \"usual suspects\" still rated the most important commercially.<\/p>\n

\"digital-marketing-trends-2014\"<\/a>

Digital marketing activities rated most important to commercial success for 2014. n=637. \u00a0Note that Social CRM was not included in the 2013 poll<\/p><\/div>\n

So, it seems as if the\u00a0three core areas of investment in marketing for 2014 are likely to continue to be Mobile and Content Marketing and Big Data in many businesses. The most significant change is in mobile marketing where there is a decline in popularity, perhaps suggesting a realisation of the difficulty of encouraging customers to buy rather than browser via this channel.<\/p>\n

But, I would like to think that Conversion Rate Optimisation and Marketing Automation will increase in investment since these are about process and improving performance, so they can potentially offer lower risk returns than other activities.<\/p>\n

Since the main top-level trends, the \u201cUsual Suspects\u201d are likely to be similar for 2014, I thought that this, year it would be interesting and more useful to drill deeper to see which specific digital marketing technologies and techniques will be important trends in 2014. I\u2019ve structured the trends based on marketing to achieve different goals across customer touchpoints in the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework<\/a>. There are 22 trends I see based on companies I have worked with, examples I have reviewed and our own marketing activity on Smart Insights.<\/p>\n

In the next sections I'll briefly run through key techniques I recommend focus on for 2014. If you prefer to browse, here is the full Slideshare deck.<\/p>\n