2015 has the beginnings of being an incredibly successful year and small businesses are best placed to take advantage of this, the economic indicators are really positive and certainly from the businesses I have met with recently it feels like everyone is in a positive mood. Ready to make 2015 the best yet? Lets consider the biggest 2015 marketing trends to help drive your business forward.
There have been lots of articles written about what the trends will be for 2015, to summarise some thoughts on a couple:
1. Defining your Target Audience:
Essential starting point for any marketer and with people changing what, how and where the invest their time and money this is becoming increasingly more difficult. No longer is enough to group people together by postcode or region as everyone is becoming more individual. Think about the vast differences between people who look to be the same on paper based on their demographic profile. One famously cited example of this would be Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne, who were both born in 1948, grew up in England, married twice, have two children, are both wealthy and both like dogs,”.
We are going to see as we move forwards far more attitude based profiling coming out, think about a mind set or reason that someone would wish to engage with your business.
“The key is to appeal to an attitude,” says Hannah Webley-Smith, Marketing Director UK and Ireland at Benefit Cosmetics.
2. Dark Social:
‘Dark social’ is web traffic that comes from sharing of content that web analytics cannot track. It happens when someone shares a link by copying and pasting it into private communications such as instant messages, emails and forum posts, though not Facebook, which is able to track links even when posted in private messages.
Nearly one-third of people globally and 26% in the UK who share content online will share only through dark social, according to a RadiumOne survey of 9,000 consumers, launched at an event hosted by The Marketing Society in November. Older consumers are more likely to use these channels, but it is not a behaviour restricted to a privacy-conscious few. In the UK, 82% of people share content online and of those 91% sometimes do it using dark social channels.
There are implications for digital marketing and customer journey analytics if brands can no longer see how users discover and reach their websites. Last year, Team Sky worked with RadiumOne using tools that tracked content across its websites, social media and mobile platforms that was shared by emails, instant messaging and forums. This was after discovering that in the previous 12 months, 95% of its content was shared via private channels.
3. Rejection of established Industries:
Start-ups and smaller brands are offering consumers new ways of effectively cutting out traditional supply chains, especially those that have failed to serve customers’ interests. It has been seen for several years in finance with peer-to-peer lending, but this year it has moved into insurance, retail and groceries, and it is a trend that will continue into 2015.
In the grocery sector this trend can already be seen in FarmDrop. The brand is a direct link between food producers and consumers operating through a click-and-collect system at local locations.
4. Quality Content:
Applied across all marketing media channels. Brands to provide content that engages with their audience.
5. Mindfulness:
We now in such a digital age that we are all as consumers being bombarded with lots of different messages and dashing from one task to the next wether it be to check emails, prepare dinner or to engage with social media. With this changing trend the idea of mindfulness and just being in the moment is going to be come a key skill to learn and enhance.
Please do get in touch if we can help get you on the right path this year.
Source: Marketing Week – 14 Jan 15.
