2015 Marketing Trends That Will Transform How You Leverage Your Authority

If you are a follower of market patterns in your industry (and I really hope you do because you should), you may have observed that online marketing is really shifting and creating some new 2015 marketing trends.

Impersonal days of old where you could remain anonymous but still earn six figures are long gone. Nowadays, customers want to be aware of who you really are and begin to like, know, and trust you.

Here are some 2015 marketing trends to which you should take into account as your plan your marketing strategies:

1. Penguin 3.0

Google just updated Penguin to help marketers like you fight spam more effectively. The previous Penguin version punished many good business owners, so this is obviously some good news. What’s more, if you did experience a traffic drop following the previous Penguin release and then made some changes to your site in response to that drop, you have a higher likelihood of gaining your favor with Google back with Penguin 3.0.

2. Social Media Marketing will be More Insightful

A number of brands use social media marketing just because somebody told them to do so. Then they go on to do a shoddy job of it, ending up with very minimal or even no returns. For example, take Copyblogger.com. They are the latest to leave Facebook despite their many followers, insisting that a majority of those were fake. But they never ran any promotions on Facebook. This shows the need for brands to bail on social media when there are no yields coming, or to start all over again when you realize that it is not working for you as effectively as it needs to.

3. LinkedIn Will Gain Even More Significance

This is partly because LinkedIn is so buttoned up that disseminating SPAM on it is not that easy, or so the saying goes. But with LinkedIn now enabling brands to publish posts, expect to see more content on the network, especially since it is also helping brands to promote in a much simpler way, allowing your content to be viewed by all your connections.

4. Brands Will Generate More Content

Content still reigns supreme, and it will likely remain so. Due to this, and since search marketing and email marketing are also still king, for the 2015 marketing trends, brands are expected to create even more original content. Article marketing sites, as well as reusing content on other websites, are fading into history.

5. Visual Content Will Gain Even More Importance

If you have not yet started converting your data into infographics or not yet generating any informative videos, then you need to get started to stay in the lead for the new 2015 marketing trends. Technology has progressed in such a way that any hurdles to entry are minimal, and customers will continue demanding more attention and interaction.

6. Brands Will Need to Conduct More In-Person Events

Those days when marketers would just sit behind their computers and avoid going out to interact with the public are long gone. Serious marketers have to put more effort to get closer and more personal with their customers via going out for in-person events, or even hosting those themselves.

7. Metrics Perform an Even More Important Role

Today business owners are realizing how vital it is to study metrics to be aware of where to move next. You need to keep informed, whether your content is consistently generating any meaningful engagement, whether your efforts are returning any sales and whether your targeted audience is heeding to your calls to action or not. You cannot determine this without understanding the numbers.

8. Brand Awareness Gains Renewed Attention

As making customers more familiar with your brand gains new precedence, tasks like guest blogging, in-person appearances, viral video making, and sponsorship are expected to be more significant. Business owners will be expected to divert more funds into brand awareness via native advertising and other methods

9. Brand Engagement Gains More Credence

That Twitter account on which you rarely tweet, the Facebook page you have left idle for several months, or the Pinterest account where you can barely recall the last time you pinned anything are all old news that need to be updated. Brand engagement requires you to fight for your brand much more consistently because you have to prove that you are in it for the long haul, and more so if you have fallen down on the task so far.

10. You Will be Paying for Reach on Facebook

The way things are going now, if you fail to pay for promoted posts to parlay the attention you are receiving into enhanced engagement, then you can easily lose out on the benefits Facebook and other social media can offer you.

The biggest transformation you’re going to see in 2015 and is going to come from the amount of effort you put into your marketing. You will be required to work harder than you have ever done just to stand out from the rest of the competition, as well as put much more effort in being creative. Perhaps you’ll even need to hire other experts to help you navigate the 2015 marketing trends and outshine your competition.