Digital Trends for 2015

Now is the time of the year when we want to switch to a lower gear, relax a little, spend some time with the family, and perhaps do some skiing (or surfing, if you happen to be Down Under). The majority of us have almost finished shipping our customers’ orders, and Singles Day in China and Black Friday as well as Cyber Monday are behind us.

So you might think it is the perfect time to look at what was achieved this year, but let’s not! Let’s think of what is out there, how consumer behavior is changing across the digital space, and what each of us should be doing in order to provide an improved customer experience to our clients.

Here are some trends for the next year that I see becoming more important to anyone involved in digital marketing.

Offline-to-Online/Online-to-Offline (O2O)

One of the biggest and most exciting things we’re seeing at the moment is a collision of offline and online within the marketing functions. It is less about an e-commerce manager or director working in isolation and more and more about leveraging offline data and offline interactions within digital, such as store visits and purchases.

It was through mobile that people first began to take what used to be “offline” data into the online world and make it measurable – and therefore make it a core part of the overall digital strategy – and now this is moving to the rest of the channels, too.

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)

UI and UX across the controlled digital channels (and thus mobile and Web) are becoming key differentiators among companies. A great example of this is www.houzz.com.

Data Generation

First-party and third-party data help companies to understand what customers are doing, how they interact with the brand at different touch points: on social, Web, mobile, paid search, and at retail points of sale.

Combining this into a single customer view allows companies to start the selling process at an earlier stage. Watch out for buzzwords like “unified profile” or “identity management.”

Big Data Becoming Even Bigger (aka Big Data 2.0) 

Here the context of big data becoming even bigger relates to collecting customer interactions, analyzing them, and providing really useful recommendations of actions to the user.

In short, machines need to start working for the users and not the other way around.

In a meeting we recently had with Forrester, the discussion spanned around the context of the communication with the client. For example, why should we use an abandoned cart strategy to recover merchandise that was already purchased in the retail shop of a brand, or retarget a customer with a discount on a product, after they already purchased the product from your company? Joining the dots in your data can help avoid these kinds of errors.

Furthermore, data collected can help with analysis on why the customer did not purchase and what can be done to improve conversions across the business. It may have been the service, the prices, or the billing process that failed, or maybe the Web pages were simply too slow. Marketers should be equipped with the information that will help them make better decisions and provide better services to their clients. Data analysis solutions will become more popular and available in 2015.

Omni-Channel

The journey to omni-channel is long – Shrek calls it the “Land of Far, Far Away,” but here is Pelin Thorogood’s explanation of the difference between multi-channel and omni-channel. It all revolves around the data that is collected and analyzed.

Channels will continue to evolve to allow marketers to get in touch with their clients, combining mobile, social, Web and email with what are considered typical advertising technologies in order to get in touch with the client and engage with them (retargeting, banner and overlays, etc.).

Automation

With more data, information, and the constant increase in the number of channels, we will also see an increased automation of processes, from communication with existing clients to the personalization and spend on ads. Now that more and more data is in one place, the big marketing opportunity for 2015 is how to take advantage of this consolidation, and take the personalization of your customer engagement strategies to the next level.

I’d like to take this opportunity and wish you and your families happy holidays and season’s greetings. Until next time, stay tuned. Ohad.