Optimization Trends in 2015: Five Tips to Stay Ahead of the Curve

A recent survey found that content marketing is still seen as the most commercially important digital marketing trend as we head through 2015. This provides a relatively stable point (content marketing has now topped the same poll for three years running) but even within that umbrella there are constant innovations and developments.

Here are five areas to keep in mind over the coming months and beyond.

Content Diversity

In 2015 content consists of far more than dry, keyword-driven blogs and externally placed articles. Good, quality written content can still play a large

part in any content strategy but the way people consume information is changing and videos, images and infographics can all help you get your message across in new and engaging ways.

Fifty-two percent of marketing professionals worldwide named video as the content type with the best ROI and the winners of the Content Marketing Association’s 2014 CMA Awards showcased just how diverse effective content marketing can be.

Overall winner Jobsite.co.uk produced a video spoof of reality show The Apprentice that resulted in 750,000 views on YouTube, 11,000 new registrations and a 173 percent increase in search volume. All this allowed the site to drastically cut the amount it spent on areas such as TV advertising and paid search. Elsewhere, Adidas used social media to create content in real-time based around unfolding events in the 2014 World Cup and British Airways recruited influential vloggers to create videos in conjunction with content on its owned print and Web channels for its #BestSummerEver campaign.

API Integration

APIs are certainly not a new thing. An application programming interface is basically a set of programming instructions and standards that allows one piece of software to communicate with and access the resources of another. Amazon was one of the first major sites to open up its API to outside developers back in 2002. Now it’s increasingly common to find live updated Amazon listings on external sites, or a Google Map embedded in the ‘find us’ section of a company’s website.

It’s been a gradual evolution rather than a revolution but the popularity of APIs has really exploded over recent years. In 2011, the world’s largest API repository, programmableweb, listed around 3,000 registered public APIs. By February 2015, there were nearly 13,000.

Many companies are opening up their APIs to increase their own revenues and to extend the value and life of their applications but in digital marketing terms, the increasing accessibility of social media APIs is perhaps the most interesting recent development. Twitter’s embedded tweets, for example, allows you to take fully interactive tweets and embed them in your own blog or website.Facebook’s Graph API provides access to objects in Facebook’s database, including users, photos, videos, conversations and places, allowing developers to create a deeper, more personalized experience for their own users.

Automation and Curation Tools

Not every piece of content has to be created from scratch in order to be valuable. There’s a lot of content out there and a lot of it could be valuable andengaging to your audience. The Internet is a big place but you should avoid selecting and sharing content automatically based on keywords alone. Tools like Curata can help you to find and contextualize relevant content before you share it, while organizational tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite can be great for helping you to synchronise and schedule your posts.

Personalization

There’s more consumer data available to professional marketers than ever before. Factors such as geo-location, search terms, referrers, and lead scores can all be used to automatically categorize users. Personalized messages can then be targeted, providing a more relevant and engaging user experience. Testing services like Adobe Target now provide A/B testing on personalization to find out what actually works and what doesn’t. A relatively new development is finding out if there’s a line to be drawn regarding over-personalization. Access to information using the Facebook Graph API, for example, could result in messages that are so targeted they could be viewed as creepy, or verging on an invasion of privacy.

Cross-platform and Mobile Optimization

This one is certainly not new. Small screens have meant increasingly big business for the past few years but in 2015 optimizing your website for mobile is pretty much essential. In the UK the majority of shopping was conducted online for the first time last year. Research from the Google Consumer Barometer meanwhile, suggests that more people now use their mobile phones to go online than computers.

The same study found that Singapore had the highest Smartphone penetration rate in the world but many businesses were still not optimizing for mobile.

Julian Persaud, managing director of Google Southeast Asia, said: “This is a massive wake-up call to any business in Singapore without a mobile optimized site or app. This is no longer a viable approach — you’re effectively slamming your shop door in the face of your customers.”