Shelley Pringle
‘Tis the season when brands release heart-warming Christmas videos and marketing bloggers write about the best holiday gift ideas, new year’s resolutions and marketing trends for 2015.
In the latter category, they’re talking about the conversion of paid, owned, earned and shared media, content amplification and visual story telling.
In addition, many are predicting the marketing developments we witnessed in 2014 will continue:
1. Technology (think: wearables) will outpace our ability to understand the ethical implications of adopting them.
2. New social media platforms will launch while existing platforms evolve and change—likely in a way that’s disadvantageous to marketers unless they invest in paid media.
3. The lines between public relations, social media, content marketing—and every other marketing discipline—will continue to blur.
4. Big data will allow us to measure everything—and as a result, nothing, if we don’t carefully select the metrics important to our business.
5. Marketing communications will become even more complex, with so many tactical options we’ll feel as though we just stepped off a merry-go-round.
Some are suggesting 2015 will be “the year of HUMAN for digital marketers,” time when we see more “marketers incorporate human-speak into their messaging—videos, pictures, humor.”
Wishful thinking? I hope not.
There’s definitely a lot going on in the world of marketing today. And too many marketers—and I include myself in this group—often adopt the next shiny object without taking the time to understand if it will help build our business.
So here is my big prediction for next year.
2015 will be the year marketers get back to basics by focusing on these important questions:
– Who is the audience?
– What drives conversion?
– How do we measure results?
Of course, some marketers never stopped asking these questions. As a result, they clearly define their marketing objectives and develop sound strategies to meet them.
Yet many brands operate in highly competitive markets. As a result, we aren’t often privy to their thinking, including their rationale for Facebook or their plans for Pinterest.
So it was refreshing when Copyblogger, a popular blog, software and training organization, deleted its Facebook page in October, opened their kimono, and publicly explained why. Even though they had 38,000 Facebook “fans,” few were engaging on the page in the form of likes and shares.
In a lengthy post, Copyblogger wrote, “it’s not our job to tell our audience where we live. It’s to grow communities where they live.” Instead of Facebook, Copyblogger is putting its energy into Twitter and Google+, platforms where people do interact with them.
With finite resources, Copyblogger considered the cost of continuing with Facebook and decided it was better to spend those resources elsewhere.
In other words, it was time to get back to basics and focus on the activities that helped their business.
Help make my prediction a reality
The world of marketing is moving so quickly it is difficult to avoid the latest social media fad. We feel the need to know something about the ‘latest and greatest’ so we can talk knowledgeably about it with our peers.
We may even decide to participate, driven by the fear of missing out, also called FOMO. (According to this article in Boston Magazine on the history of FOMO, some “studies estimate that around 70 percent of all adults in developed countries suffer from the creepy, sometimes all-consuming feeling that something’s happening and they’re not a part of it.”)
Instead of ignoring Ello, for example, we worry it will become wildly popular. We establish a profile … and then face the onerous reality of regularly feeding content to yet another platform.
Other priorities are sidelined. We neglect our marketing objectives and strategies to participate in something that may deliver little return.
There are so many options for marketers today we simply can’t do everything and be everywhere. If you want to build your business in 2015, I challenge you to make my prediction a reality and get back to basics.
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