What’s on Your Marketing Radar this year?January 2014

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2014 - it’s all about the individual & tailored brand stories.Consumers are smarter and more vocal than ever before. No longer are the storytelling controls in marketer’s hands, the end-user and consumer can jump in at any time and take over. For marketers, this means a shift to more focused branding and the need for more refined tools to measure any initiative’s effectiveness.

Top internet marketing predictions for 2014

Customer Advocacy Becomes Crucial

Big Data Leverage Will Be Possible for Smaller Businesses

Google+ Stops Biding Its Time

Social Signals Beat Backlinks for Top Rankings

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Mobile Marketing Explodes

Segmentation Makes Marketing Automation a Necessity

Video Marketing Gains Dominance

Content Remains King

Business Blogging Will Rise

Customer Advocacy Becomes Crucial

Find the customers who love your brand, reward them, and encourage them to advocate for you

More companies are creating specific roles to head up customer advocacy programs

Salesforce1 Customer Platform can help

There’s too much noise for a single voice to cut through the crowd, brands need to build their army of advocates

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Big Data Leverage Will Be Possible for Smaller Businesses

Users are generating more and more valuable marketing data every second

Companies that leverage data will have a competitive advantage and stronger customer advocacy

Now there are “Big-Data-as-a-service” companies sprouting up that put the power of Big Data into your hands

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Google+ Stops Biding Its Time

Google has been slowly integrating its services under Google+

One of the biggest rollouts was requiring a G+ account to post comments on YouTube

Seeing signs that they are ranking visible comments in YouTube based on G+ activities

Study by SearchMetrics concludes that sharing on Google will overtake Facebook by 2016

If Facebook stumbles, watch for a possible victory for Google in the social media world

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Social Signals Beat Backlinks for Top Rankings

For years, Google’s primary way of measuring was through backlinks

Google has been experimenting with social signal measurement

We believe that social media signals will outrank the importance of backlinks

It may be time for a wakeup call if you’ve been betting on backlinks

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Mobile Marketing Explodes

Android holds an impressive share of the smartphone market

Apple and Windows phones are still in the running

As mobile platforms becomes better and better, marketing toward mobile phone users will in turn become better

Mobile usage is an undeniable factor in interacting with content

Marketers need to accept this reality and move mobile optimization up on their priority lists

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Segmentation Makes Marketing Automation a Necessity

Consumers are becoming smarter and expect more of a one-on-one experience with brands

Marketers will have to turn away from larger demographics to very tightly defined ones

Need to segment will require an increase in usage of marketing automation techniques and tools

As the market continues to fracture into finer and finer categories, expect new automation strategies and platforms to pop up

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Video Marketing Gains Dominance

Of the top 10 fastest growing apps in the world, four are visually based - Vine, Flickr, Instagram and YouTube.

Vine grew 403% from the first part to the second part of 2013

Video will only grow over the course of the coming year

As social media channels and content platforms improve, more emphasis needs to be placed on visual content

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Content Remains King

73% of people prefer to get information about an organization through articles, rather than traditional ads

61% of people feel better about companies that deliver custom content and are more likely to buy from them

Entertaining, storytelling, informative content will triumph over bland, run of the mill content

Key to winning over new customers will be a focus on authentic and relevant content

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Business Blogging Will Rise

61% of US consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post

Old advertising portals are also forcing shifts toward quality instead of quantity

A marketer never has to worry about the algorithm changing on a business blog

Brands need to produce excellent, highly-relevant content in order to dominate

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Each year brings about new challenges for marketers. The marketers who stand out in 2014 are the ones who take advantage of the shifting tides.