t’s my favourite time of blogging year, where we look ahead to what will be the major trends in digital marketing in the year ahead. I find there’s a real thirst for knowledge amongst marketers about the latest trends in digital marketing and Ienjoy reviewing the latest marketing techniques and technologies. For the past few years I have given my recommendations on the trends as I see them, based on reviewing innovation in marketing technology through the year, plus crowdsourcing what Smart Insights readers see as important for them.
February 2015 Digital Trends Update
Well, we're well into 2015 now and we have been adding to our coverage of the latest trends. After you have taken a look at the tools listed here, I hope these may be useful too:
Managing Digital Marketing 2015 - free 25 page report for members
State of Digital Marketing infographic
Email marketing Trends 2015 - free 20 page report for members
State of content marketing infographic
Marketing technology in 2015 - Scott Brinker's compilation of tools
What are the most important online marketing trends for marketers?
In deciding on the most relevant trends for marketers I don’t just look at what’s “Hot” or “Cool”, but instead I focus on what make the biggest difference to marketers, from a commercial sense, since most of us are working in marketing to get better results for our companies or our clients. Here are the digital marketing trends we identified last year. This year we again asked readers to take a poll where we asked...
Which single digital marketing technique do you think will make the biggest commercial impact for you in 2015?
So, what were the results of the poll? Interesting! Content marketing topped the poll for the third-year running and in fact was even further ahead compared to previous years since mobile marketing and social media marketing have declined in importance as marketers have implemented these changes. It's close for second, third and fourth position. It's significant that 'Big Data' is still in second position although the hype has receded. I think this shows the potential for companies to implement more data-driven marketing techniques in 2015, which will likely be closely related to marketing automation which is in third place.
In the later parts of this post I review different types of analytics and reporting tools - perhaps not 'Big Data', but certainly to support data-driven marketing in 2015.