Digital and Social Media marketing has grown, evolved, and gotten increasingly more sophisticated over the past year. In today’s omni-channel world eyeballs have moved away from TV and Print onto digital and social. Today, almost all marketers and brands, big or small, have a social presence established and are using various social platforms, content types and devices to engage with the consumers. In 2015, digital marketing budgets will increase by 8%, according to a recent Gartner’s CMO Spend Report, in which a survey of 315 marketing decision makers representing organizations with more than $500 million in annual revenue was conducted. The same survey revealed that on average these organizations spent a quarter of their marketing budget on digital & social marketing in 2014. And this is expected only to go up.
As the social media marketing ecosystem becomes more complex (campaigns are cross-channel, content-centric, and more integrated with other digital marketing programs), there are several trends emerging. The rise of content marketing using social media is one such key trend.
Instead of pushing “in-your-face” advertising, sophisticated marketers are using interactive content and games to engage consumers. Customer experience is the top innovation project for 2015, continuing its role as the top priority for marketing investment in 2014. According to a BIA Kelsey’s study, U.S. content marketing via social media is expected to reach $18 billion by 2018.
Another big trend is the increased use of specialized predictive analytics. Digital marketing analytics expenses are expected to increase by 60% in 2015, marking a year of increasingly sophisticated social media dashboards with better metrics. Social media analytics traditionally used to mean using tools to “listen” to what is being said about one’s brand on the social-verse and use that to engage with consumers in a better way.
In 2015, social media analytics will move beyond the social space. It will be combined with other data sources and analytics techniques to—measuring effectiveness (ROI) of digital marketing efforts, quantify impact on sales, make individualized direct marketing offers based on what individuals are saying on social media, predicting content that is going to go viral, use social media trends as a leading indicator to changes in brand equity, satisfaction and loyalty.
Measuring the effectiveness of digital and social media marketing campaigns is emerging as the most crucial component in an organization’s social media analytics agenda. Marketers are used to measuring effectiveness of campaigns based on incremental sales generated and hence, the Return on Investment (ROI) of marketing efforts. But digital marketing effectiveness is usually measured by unique & new metrics—likes, retweets, favorites, clicks, impressions, etc. As the spending on social platforms increases, there is an increasing pressure on marketers to show impact on sales, ROI of these efforts and not just mention number of clicks, etc. This is where analytics can help. Using advance predictive and attribution modeling techniques marketers can get an estimate of incremental sales generated, ROI, incremental brand recall and awareness generated etc.
Developing more accurate, contextual and near real-time text analytics algorithms remain a big area of focus in the social media analytics space. Since the digital customer has to be engaged in minutes and not days, the need for the analytics to be real time is very big. Related to this is the increasing trend of the local language web. Hence the algorithms not only should work on English text but also with Chinese, Hindi, Russian, etc.
Being Mobile ready will be a big priority for social media marketers as well as social media analysts considering a worldwide mobile penetration of 93%. Mobile lets brands create and take advantage of existing compelling micro moments at different stages of the purchase journey, be it through SMS, push notifications or in-app product recommendations. With technological progress in terms of geo-fencing and geo-targeting, brands are putting mobile and owned mobile apps at the core of their marketing activities reaching their customers with timely and highly contextual messages on a one-to-one basis. And analytics needs to support these one-on-one marketing engines. Algorithms that recommend who to contact, with what message, via what channel (app, sms, notifications) are a core backbone of such contextual marketing efforts. This will spread beyond mobile into multiple devices and wearable technology (e.g. Apple watch) with the spread of the Internet of Things.
Instavid, Vine, Snapchat, Hyperlapse—social video is up and coming holding two major benefits for brands. First, audio-visual storytelling is emotionally compelling. Secondly, vloggers and micro-vloggers are a great way of getting your message in front of your audience. Common users produce a lot of content on new platforms such as Vine and Instagram. Marketers need to tap into this productivity and make user generated content part of their marketing strategy. Companies that invest in video could see their shopping cart increase by 174%.
Predictive analytics and content marketing will be the hot areas of interest and investment for CMOs. As the number of digital marketing tools will grow in 2015, the number of digital marketing analytics tools will also increase. Some of them will come embedded in existing marketing automation tools. 2015 is going to be a year where social media analytics emerges as the backbone of the digital marketing teams. Three things that everyone should think about as they get started are: Defining analytic objectives, understanding the data that is available, and building an ecosystem team, partners and tools.
The author is director, analytics & head of the product and solutions group at Absolutdata. He has over 13 year experience in delivering marketing & customer analytics to global Fortune 500 clients.
