As the new year approaches, it’s important to reflect on how the trends we’ve seen in the past year will impact marketers in the year ahead. For marketers, 2015 will be the year of more personalized customer interactions, a time to leverage more accurate measurement tools, and the time to fully embrace the rapid mobile expansion around the world.
The year will move fast, and here’s what we expect to see in 2015:
1 Mobile devices will continue to gain more share of consumer’s attention. This shift has created a new space in people’s routines that is changing the way we experience media – more choice over what they see (e.g. more images, news and videos) — plus how we shop, with many new ways to discover products. Advertising needs to be focused on reaching people, in this new space and across several experiences, instead of focusing on one place or one experience.
2 Digital advertising will shift from being measurable to being truly accountable. Basic forms of measurement, such as click-based attribution models, only tell us a very small part of the story. With more scale, accuracy and new measurement tools, marketers will be able to understand what worked and focus on what matters to their businesses: brand metrics and sales.
3 Businesses that take a more personalized approach will win. Marketers have more information and tools to create relevant campaigns than ever before and people increasingly expect the ads they see to be relevant across all channels. According to eMarketer, just 5 percent of client-side marketers worldwide said they were personalizing extensively.
4 Messaging will increasingly become a key part of how businesses interact with customers directly. Real-time dialogue is important in quickly addressing ongoing customer needs. As more people continue to gravitate toward message-based communication, businesses will shift by opening up this new channel of communication to maintain a constructive dialogue with employees and customers.
5 World population growth is being driven by high-growth countries, and it's mobile. As our world population continues to grow over the next 10 years, most of that growth will occur in countries outside of the US. According to eMarketer in the next three years, mobile phone penetration will rise from 61.1 percent to 69.4 percent of the global population. As more people become mobile first, businesses and marketers will follow.
Every day we need to work together to help businesses stay connected with the right people and continue to grow. Our teams are excited about the connected year ahead.
Matthew Idema is product marketing director, ads, with Facebook.