Are you really ready for 2014?

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)