Six things you need to have in your 2014
plans
Its December and most marketing folks will
have polished off their 2014 plans, earmarked budgets and are about to take a
few well-earned days off before their untaken leave allowance expires. But
before you head off, and for those who are still thinking about 2014, here are
six things you really need to have in your plans in some shape or form. Even if
you are not fully executing them next year, these are the six main areas of
marketing that are becoming increasingly important and specialized and any self
respecting marketer or agency needs to get clued up on and be developing them for
their brands.
Mobile: If you haven’t noticed, a paradigm shift has already happened;
mobile and tablets have overtaken PC computers in sales and usage, to the point
where a recent report in the US highlighted the decline in laptop thefts as
they are deemed unworthy items to steal compared to smartphones and tablets.
Mobile search is predicted to overtake desktop queries by 2015 in the US, while
it may happen even sooner in Jordan with over 50% of all handsets being smart
phones and a relatively higher % of mobile users who do not have a desktop.
As smartphones become more ubiquitous and
powerful, the expectations are for brands to have a strong mobile optimized
presence and provide follow up actions to take customers further on their
journey, be it for sharing, comparing, requesting, booking, app downloading or
the ever-closer-to-reality, mobile payment. Beyond optimizing your site for
mobile, you need to optimize the entire brand experience for those who are
seeking content and actions through their mobiles.
Measurable
and effective Social Media: Likes, shares,
engagements, ‘talking abouts” are all lovely but frankly useless unless you are
able to quantify the effect on your bottom line and track users to see how
engagements effect your customer journey. Needless to say it’s a lot easier
said than done, but that brings us to the glue that binds everything in this
article: Data.
Data: The challenge remains how to assemble the vast amounts of data
that is fragmented and difficult to reassemble, but with so many free and
accessible tools (like Google analytics, Facebook Conversation measurements)
and through adopting tracking analytics with enterprise tools like SalesForce
Buddy Media and Adobe Social, one can begin to calculate ROI and message
awareness on social and digital initiatives. The more touchpoints created to
facilitate the customer journey, the more data is exchanged. The more these
touchpoints are interconnected (think mobile), the more measurable, segmentable
and ultimately more actionable the engagements become. That being said, you’ll
also need to develop content that your customer will value throughout the
journey.
Content: To develop great content you ironically need data, or at least
enough understanding of your audience and customers. The purpose of content is
primarily to give relevant value and resonate with the right people, but also
to help raise your search result rankings and relevance, which brings us to
SEO.
Search
Engine Optimization: If you don’t address the above
areas, you can’t possibly be doing any meaningful SEO, and it isn’t something
you do once or twice a year as it’s a perpetual initiative that runs along
everything else you do online. Each year
Google changes its search algorithms 500-600 times, some minor, some major, but
that basically means a daily vigilance is needed to optimize your content and its
format.
The
whole brand experience: Ultimately the above are
vital components of a marketing plan that considers the entire customer journey
and the overall brand experience. Marketers and agencies need to remove
themselves from the trap of thinking within disciplines (digital, PR, sales,
ATL, BTL etc..) and design the customer’s experience from the users
perspective. Digital is just as important as every other element in the brand
experience, but digital is where the engagements can become more meaningful,
personal and action oriented and gives marketers a better deal of control and
measurability.
So if you’ve included all that in your
plans, enjoy your holidays, otherwise happy planning.
(First appeared in Venture Magazine December 2013)
