Three Digital Trends to Move You Forward in 2015

If you work in sales or marketing you know that trends and strategies are always evolving, and that's what we love about our jobs. It keeps us on our toes. Always looking forward for the next idea to give us and those we work with a competitive advantage.

We hope that you've been successful throughout 2014 and continue that success during 2015, so without any further delay here are our top-3 trends to move you forward in the new year.

1. Transparency

Think about this. There has never been as much content on the internet as there is today. Personally (and I know I'm not alone), if I'm researching a new product and I see its website withholding information then I will switch to one of the several other product tabs I have opened up (forums, review sites, etc) to get my research done. Your customers like making smart decisions, so help them out. You've likely already spent some money on a great design, which is great, but put yourself in your visitors' shoes and ask yourself, "Is this site useful to me?"

Keep in mind that transparency isn't just company and product info to set-and-forget. With a collection of different channels available, it's easier than ever to keep your followers in-the-loop with real-time updates.

2. More brands adopt a mobile-first strategy

If you're still reluctant to optimize your website for mobile users, go for a walk around the mall. How many shoppers do you see on their phones? I bet it's more than you saw 1-2 years ago. These shoppers are checking their email, doing research, and killing time, so they won't be on your website for very long if you don't provide them a good experience.

In a mobile-first strategy be sure that everything you want included on your website is on the mobile version. After that, feel free to scale-up your website for desktop users and make use of the additional screen real-estate you get with them. Responsive design is perfect for this. For more info on responsive design take a look at our previous blog post here.

Bonus stat: Forrester predicts that by 2020, consumer data collected from wearable devices will drive 5% of sales from the global 1000.

3. Social ad spending

Years ago in the Wild West of social media we could post a simple Facebook update and get some great reach and engagement. It's quite different today. Recently many pages have been noticing a +40% drop in reach. If Facebook flooded a users feed with nothing but promotion, why would they stay? They wouldn't. But while you may not reach as many users organically, you can still reach users with Facebook ads.

To this end we certainly have to give Facebook some credit. It's not the perfect platform, but they spend a lot of time making the network enjoyable for both users and advertisers. Users don't get bombarded and advertisers have a plethora of data at their fingertips to target their messages to very specific user groups.

With other networks following suit, the pay-to-play option seems as though it's here to stay. Leverage organic success when you can (Snapchat & Instagram are still pretty good options for this), but don't be afraid to dive into the social data to push your messages to followers & potential customers.

We'd love to chat

If you're preparing for 2015 let us know. Give us a call or contact us today and we'd love to go through some ideas and options best fit for your brand.