Top Digital Marketing Trends and Predictions in 2015

Things are changing very fast when it comes to digital marketing (DM). In this post, we have tried to focus on some of the top trends and predictions in 2015 pertaining to DM. 

In the last 5 - 6 years, digital marketing has undergone a considerable change, and has become the most significant medium for making your brand’s presence felt. Just as businesses have become increasingly dependent on communication technologies, digital marketing is rapidly evolving to help them move towards a specific direction, distinguished from their competitors and embracing new practices and rendering some practices out of date. So, what’s imminent in the future when it comes to digital marketing? To get the answers, keep reading this post to learn about the top digital marketing trends and predictions in 2015.

Use of Analytics Tools Will Increase

In 2014, marketers are already using a lot of analytics tools to measure how their customers are interacting with their websites, products or services. This trend will shoot up even more in 2015, and expenditures for this purpose would rise by 60 percent. 

In 2015, these are some of trends that will dominate:

• Marketing info and data will be the most significant aspect in any marketing endeavor. 
• Businesses will use special software to make the best use of the marketing data.
• Customers would be generating loads of data

Content Marketing Will Rule 

Content marketing strategies will hold a significant place in the coming year. This means marketers will do away with traditional means of marketing and switch to creating unique, useful, inspiring and relevant content for their targeted audience. Businesses will be less reliant on age-old techniques; instead their focus would be more on content creation based on user experience.

Bridging the Gap between Offline and Online Experience 

The big step for marketers in 2015 would be bridging the gap between offline and online experience. To combine offline and online experiences, the possible micro-location technologies to be used are iBeacon from Apple. Again, wearable technology will be popular in 2015. Digital marketing will build a new environment for marketers so that they would be able to keep pace with the changing needs of modern day customers.   

Use of Tailored Content 

Today, marketers need to create content that would help users to interact with. This can be good if you churn out content that is relevant to your prospective customers. With tailored content, businesses will be able to lower cost of production, improve sales figures and encourage users to spend more time on their websites, fostering consumer satisfaction. Personalized content would be the in-thing in 2015 resulting in the growth of one-to-one marketing. 

More and More Videos to be Used for Marketing 

In the past few years, more and more videos are being used for marketing. Instead of using loads of content to explain the benefits of your products/services, videos are more effective in explaining to a layman how your products or services work or how they simply your customers’ lives. This is not possible to achieve with bland text or a few images. 

In 2015, brands will be creating ‘Explainer Videos’ effectively and use them to improve user experience.  

Visual Storytelling Will Be Rampant 

Since there is a lot of marketing noise and information overload, marketers would like to use something to make their message stand out from the rest. This can be best done with the help of visual storytelling. In 2015, visual storytelling would be used for:

• Nurturing and engaging consumer communities 
• Conveying your brand’s values and aesthetics 

The increased use of visual storytelling will help you connect with your consumers, inspire emotions and convey a clear brand message to potential customers. 

More Dollars Spent on Online Ads 

In the coming year, expenditure on online ads would increase by 10%. And, when it comes to mobile ads, they are predicted to increase by a whopping 48% in 2015. This trend will continue in 2015 and onwards enabling marketers to target specific audiences. 

Mobile Marketing Will Reign Supreme 

The use of mobile will keep growing in every facet of business – digital and online marketing is no exception. People use smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices all day and for various purposes. This would be great opportunity marketers in 2015 to target these mobile users during different times of the day, i.e. at work, during lunch hours or when someone is resting at home. 

Targeted Ads Would Be More Effective 

People visiting different websites leave loads of useful data on the internet. Again, Facebook and Twitter are valuable storehouses of information about their users. Accessing such data will help marketers to reach out to their niche audience and use targeted ads more effectively than before. 

In 2015, targeted advertising is expected to be twice as effectual as non-targeted ads. One of the studies revealed that retargeted display ad would encourage more people to look for a product. 

We at SBR Technologies Pvt. Ltd. believe that digital marketing strategies and tactics must be instantly responsive to the likes and preferences of your targeted customers. This is the key to success.  

How SEO Makes Your Content Superior, Smarter and Better?

A content developer if he is required to write and at the same time has to focus on SEO, there are possibilities of the content becoming weak. When a writer is made to integrate odd, keyword saturated phrases into an otherwise impeccable and engaging content, all of the creative components vanish from a web page copy, article or blog post. Fly by the night SEO professionals waste their time by focusing more on search engines and not users, thus contaminating the web and making content quality fall and also irrelevant.

You now know that overemphasis on search engine optimization produces negative results. Be it outdated SEO practices or how SEO is ruining content – the information relating to both content and SEO is not too rosy. Most of the times, they are not too accurate either.

If you believe that SEO is sullying your content, it implies you are adhering to optimization techniques that have become obsolete and are penalized by Google. If you are managing SEO and content simultaneously, you need to be a good writer as well as have adequate knowledge about search engine optimization.

To balance the score, we are going to talk about how legitimate SEO techniques actually make your content superior and better, and not damage it.

Encourage Keyword Research & Use Apt Words that Visitors Search

As a content creator, it is easy assuming that you know what your target audience wants to know or read. Accordingly, you use words that you think is appropriate for your content. However, through optimization, you actually get to know about the right things and use them in the content to make it more user-friendly.

The keyword research tools that you can use are:

•    Google Keyword Planner
•    Ubersuggest
•    Wordtracker

These tools will actually guide you as to how visitors are using or referring to topics when searching on Google. The search terms suggested by these tools should be used in your content to make it better. This will give you a fair idea of how a normal internet user refers to any topic or subject.

By using the correct search terms in your content that users are typing when looking for information, you are actually improving your content’s visibility to users.

Organizes Your Content

In a book or novel, you will find chapters and gradual development of plot and characters to move the story forward. The same rule holds true for websites. You will find page hierarchy and a natural sequence as to how a visitor navigates through your website. The content churned out for each of the web pages should relate to the product, service or information that a specific page wants to highlight.

Focusing on SEO while writing, you need to:

•    Consider your site architecture, i.e. how one page leads to another
•    Avoid incorporating all information about a specific topic into a single web page just to show that you know so much.

SEO Makes Web Pages Useful for Visitors

Google has made it quite clear that poor, irrelevant and lean content will not score well and consequently the performance of your website will be adversely affected. Now, SEO is all about making your website useful for your visitors. In 2014 and henceforth, your SEO strategies should be aligned with the principles of user oriented marketing and user experience.

For example, if your website focuses on window cleaning devices, your content should put emphasis on information as to how window cleaning can be effortlessly done by homeowners instead of cramming the pages with product specifications. Appropriate product descriptions highlighting its usefulness along with the right keyword usage would also make your site worthy and visible to users.

SEO Helps in Generating New Ideas

Content writers come with the gift of the gab, i.e. they know what to write. However, there is something known as ‘Writer’s block’. This means, how good you are at writing can’t think of interesting ideas to pen down your thoughts. Bring into play SEO insights from analytics to think of unique topics for articles, blogs, whitepapers, e-books or what to include in your next infographic. You can look up:

•    Related searches in Google, Yahoo or Bing
•    Google’s auto correct that inspects the words you type and provides suggestions of alternative keywords and spellings

Churn out Different Flavors of Content

With the recent changes and advancements in SEO, you can actually connect with the right audience using different flavors or forms of content. These contents can be used to help your website rank better in the SERPS and promote your products/services. You can market your content through:

•    In-depth articles
•    Informative and interactive blogs
•    Whitepapers
•    Question-Answers
•    Videos
•    E-books
•    Slides and presentations

SEO doesn’t adversely affect your content if done in the right way; instead it improves. At SBR Technologies Pvt. Ltd , our SEO and content team work in collaboration to make your content richer, better, smarter and visible to your audience and connect with them.

Most Liked WordPress Social Media Plugins

With WP social plugins, users are able to instantly share that they like on your web page – whether it is an entire article or an image on your brand’s social profiles.

Read this post to learn about some of the most popular WP social media plugins.

AddThis

• It helps you promote your post on more than 330 social and bookmarking platforms
• Provides a complete overview of stats of clicks and shares on a daily or weekly basis according to custom settings

AddToAny

• Lets visitors share content on more than 100 social and bookmarking platforms
• Optimized for mobile devices
• Supports custom placement

Social Media Widget

• Options to share on several social channels with multiple icon sizes
• Supports animation effects like scale, fade in, combo, bounce etc.
• Right, left and center alignments are supported

 ShareThis

• An up to date look with 120+ social channel sharing options
• Option to alter icon sizes
• Statistics of social media shares
• Evaluation of social quality of registered site

NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

•  Republishing of blog posts automatically to Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumbler, Blogger etc.

Digg Digg

• Supports Facebook likes as well as send buttons
• Adds floating social sharing buttons
• Print and email options
• Customization of appearance and location of a social button

Social Login, Social Sharing and Social Commenting

• Customized sharing buttons 
• Supports commenting using social media profiles
• Lets users to login into website with their Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ profiles

Social Media Feather

• Stylish, modern and lightweight social buttons helping visitors to share content very fast
• Supports customization of sizes, icons, and rendering a high quality look

WordPress Social media plugins provide several benefits and lets you do anything that you want. What WP plugins have you used and why?

Please feel free to share your views with us.

How to Get the Most out of Your Brand’s Visual Social Content?

You are spending a lot of your time on visual social media content for improving your brand’s presence online. Then, are you able to reap the maximum benefits out of your efforts? Are you using the right colors, fonts and smart effects to make your brand’s visual content on Facebook, Google+ etc. more recognizable? If not, try some of these simple design techniques to add zing to your social media images.

Maintain Consistency in Fonts

Many businesses use text overlays as titles, body copy and sub headings. If you are doing the same, select 2-3 fonts at the most and use these in all your social media visuals.

Keep the Size of Your Logo Uniform

If you are using your brand logo, decide on a minimum size and use it across all the images in your social posts. The logo must not overshadow the design; however it should not be too small to become unnoticeable either.
  
Use Your Brand Color

Have you seen the posts created by famous brands? If yes, then you have noticed that they use their brand colors repetitively in their images, logo, and text. This is where the significance of brand-consistent colors comes into play stirring up emotions relevant to a brand.


Use Filters

Images used in your social posts should have an interesting and engaging look and feel. And, such an impact can only be achieved if you are using signature filters. However, before using them, ensure that which of the filters match with your brand’s design components. One filter can add more impact to certain colors while another brighten up your images.

Pick Out Images that Go with Your Brand Persona, Products/Services

Whether you are using visuals as stand-alone posts or as a background, you need to choose images that go with the persona of your company, products and services.

Opt for Templates

You can foster recognition of your brand using a number of templates. Not only these templates make it simpler for you to create visuals fast but they are also ideal for user engagement.

How would like to get your brand identified on social media using visuals? Please share your thoughts and ideas with us.

Handle Accidents, Shootings or Assaults in Your Campus Using Facebook!

Social networking giant Facebook (FB) can be used to tackle campus emergencies like shootings, accidents, robberies or assaults, a study reveals. Since students stay connected to FB most of the time, it’s easy to alert them about such campus violence that has amplified in the last couple of decades.

Though TV channel or campus radio is there but they are not free from limitations. Facebook users can get instant notifications on their smartphones or mobile devices to stay safe and alert.

Twitter Pampers its Users with Instagram-like Photo Filters

The popular social microblogging platform Twitter now pampers its users even more by giving them more control of their pictures. Twitter apps for Android and iOS have now replaced the ordinary photo-filter grid with a new and easy to use Instagram-style line of flexible filters.

You can double tap on the filters to see an intensity slider displaying thumbnails of how the images would appear.
   
So, why choose Instagram when you can use these filters over your drab looking phone images right from Twitter itself.

10 WP Plugins to Add Some Christmas Flavor to Your Website

The clock is ticking. Tick tock! Tick tock! Yes, the countdown for Christmas has begun! When homes are embellished with Christmas trees, bells, lights and baubles and stores stacked with gift items, there is no basis why your website can’t be adorned with boughs of holly.

Keep reading this post to learn about these free WordPress (WP) plugins to pep up your website this Christmas!

1. Simply Snow

•     This plugin lets you add a simple snow effect to your website without overdoing it. 
•      Lightweight and doesn’t affect page load time adversely 

 2. Tribulant Snow Storm

• Offers an eye-catching display of snowflakes spraying down on your WP site
• Configure a few settings like the amount of snow, color, mobile support or whether the snow clings to the base of the screen

3. Advent Calendar

• Get new and customized Christmas-theme images every day with Advent Calendar.
• Exclusive holiday-theme visual content till Christmas

4. Improved Let It Snow

• Configure this wonderful plugin to specify the shape, color, and how fast the snow falls to fill your web page.
• Also configure to ascertain whether the snow accumulates at the base of the screen

5. Christmas Ball on Branch

• Displays a little Christmas branch with a jazzy trinket in the right-hand  top corner
• Even illuminates!

6. Christmas Countdown Widget

• Adding this widget would show Santa’s beard doing the countdown until Christmas arrives
• Helps in cheering up your visitors

7. Snow, Balloons and More

• Set up leaves, snowflakes, Santa, lights and Christmas trees to glide down your website using this plugin
• Makes your website more eye-catching during the festive season

8. Xmas Lights

• Xmas Lights help you incorporate a series of multihued Christmas lights to greet your visitors this shopping season.
• Adds a festive, unique touch to your site without looking gaudy

9. Hello Christmas

• Activate Hello Christmas to display random lyrics from well-liked Christmas carols in the right hand top corner of the admin screen.

10. Holiday Message

• This plugin lets you wish your visitors a ‘Happy Holiday’ message.
• Display your message full width along the base, in the center, or right or left of the bottom of a web page.
• Customize your message and pick from one of seven visuals 

So, what WP plugins you are incorporating into your website this Christmas? Or you are looking for a custom festive theme? Feel free to share with us.