The Year that was for Digital Marketing

In the cut throat competitive world of today, consumers are kings as they enjoy the luxury of choosing from an increasing bouquet of products and services on offer. The struggle to get them to become loyal customers of your brand is an increasingly difficult one and requires oodles of smart and creative thinking coupled with technology deployment. Using the right technologies and platforms to market your products in a manner that appeals to your target group is ultimately what digital marketing is all about. Digital marketing is truly a world without boundaries encompassing the entire spectrum of devices from smartphones and gaming consoles to tablets and desktops. It covers the entire gamut of practices from email marketing to videos and social media and represents one of the most cost effective means of reaching your target audience- the challenge being to make it efficient and effective in this world of increasing consumer choice.

The Year that was for Digital Marketing

2014 saw phenomenal shifts in digital marketing practices as a direct consequence of search engine updates brought about by Google, with as many as 13 updates, the most significant one being the Panda 4.1 update in September 2014. Google’s updates changed the face of digital marketing to bring content marketing up front and centre. While content reigns supreme, link building still remains a significant factor in search rankings as also affirmed by Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam at Google. Matt refers to backlinks as being a “really, really big win in terms of quality for search results”. Amit Singhal, Google’s unofficial head of search, during an interview with Danny Sullivan at SMX West 2014 also affirmed the same when he said, “Links are clearly an important signal about the importance of your content. They’re still very valuable.” However link building in 2014 was very different from what it was even till a year back as Google’s updates led to detection of unnatural links and manipulation and removing them from search results altogether. In 2014, link building was about promotion and not manipulation. It was about adding value to your brand or product in a particular way and then promoting it to other websites in a persuasive way to build worthwhile links.

Another important fact to emerge in 2014 was that social signals like Facebook and Twitter do not factor into Google search engine algorithms. In an interview in January 2014, Matt Cutts put to rest all speculation related to social signals and search rankings by categorically stating”Facebook and Twitter pages are treated like any other pages in our web index so if something occurs on Twitter or occurs on Facebook and we’re able to crawl it, then we can return that in our search results. But as far as doing special specific work to sort of say “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms.

Cutts however goes on to state that this is not to say that social networks like Facebook and Twitter do add value by adding, “So I’m not saying not to use Twitter or Facebook, I love to tweet, there’s a ton of people who get a ton of value from both Facebook and Twitter. I think both of those services represent a fantastic avenue, it’s a way to drive visitors and traffic to your site, it’s a way to let people know about news related to you or your company or website, so I think they’re great ways to build up your personal brand. But don’t necessarily assume that just because there is a signal on Facebook or Twitter that Google is able to access that. A lot of pages might be blocked or there might be nofollow on links or something along those lines.”

2014 had its own share of challenges for digital marketers with Google updates and increasing effectiveness of digital marketing through higher conversion rates being one of the top ones. Another big challenge was delivering personalized experiences as corroborated by 75% of all marketers in the Adobe 2014 Digital Marketing Optimization Survey study who believe that personalization is important to their organization’s long-term goals but also agree that that they have a lot more to do to provide efficient, effective personalization for their customers and prospects. Adobe 2014 Digital Marketing Optimization Survey saw participation from over 1000 respondents globally—60% from North America, 27% from Europe and 13% from Asia—and incorporated interactive benchmarks around optimization and personalization across digital channels.

The 2014 Digital Marketing Industry Survey by Moz highlighted that content creation was among the top-5 activities for every major group of marketers. With 71% of respondents reporting increased demand, content marketing reported the highest year-over-year demand increase Approximately 79% of consultants reported offering content creation as a service (second only to analytics at 85%). We give below the major digital marketing trends for 2014 emerging from numerous surveys that that are likely to continue impacting 2015 as well.

  • Testing is critical to decision making as far as digital marketing is concerned with 70% of top performers use testing in various capacities, compared to only 46% for the rest of the sample. Decision making will increasingly be governed by data metrics.
  • Web analytics which emerged in a big way in 2014 will continue to grow and influence digital marketing in 2015 as well.
  • As search engines evolve and strengthen, optimization will become a key digital marketing tool for improving rankings and conversion. Moz 2014 Industry survey highlighted keyword optimization as a major gainer in digital marketing practices for 2014.
  • A key component of personalization is targeted content which emerged in a significant way in 2014 and is likely to see sustained growth in 2015 as well.
  • Lastly, mobile is likely to continue its upward trajectory as more and more marketers optimize their digital marketing tools to increase effectiveness across mobile platforms and devices.

The growing importance of digital marketing vis-à-vis all other forms of marketing is further affirmed by a Gartner survey which showed that approximately 51 % of participating companies planned to increase their digital marketing budgets by 17 per cent with customer experience technology, Gartner managing vice president, Yvonne Genovese, said that “digital marketing was the number one-ranked CEO priority” over the next five years thanks to connected devices and the growing Internet of Things.

“For marketers in 2014, it’s less about digital marketing than marketing in a digital world. Hence, marketers manage a much more balanced and integrated marketing mix than in previous years, which were characterized by online and offline silos. The resulting digital experience moves customers toward a more self-service buying model, allowing reductions in sales budgets that were designed around older, physical models.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Amit Mishra

Amit Mishra, the co-founder of Media Search Group, loves to pen down about marketing and designing. Be it search engine optimization(SEO) tips and strategies, Social Media Optimization, Increasing Engagement, and Traffic Score, Web Design and Development, Mobile Applications, Conversion/Sales, he covers it all. Been in the business for a long time, Amit Mishra knows some of the best strategies on how to expand and grow a Business Online.

Latest posts by Vijaya Tyagi (see all)