Last week Jamie Brighton, Strategic Marketing at Adobe presented their ”Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Digital Trends 2015”. How can we enlist the help of technology to be or stay on the cutting edge and exceed our customers’ expectations?
The survey were done between November 2014 and January 2015, more that 6.000 respondents globally across all sectors and both B2B and B2C. According to the briefing we have exiting opportunities ahead of us: content marketing, customer experience, mobile and social are areas that are most challenging. But also content marketing is mentioned as a very exiting opportunity to come, but was also one of the highest ranked last year. Mobile, personalization and content are the areas where we’re going to experiment most this year whilst social on the other hand is moving to a ”business as usual” position.
Customer experience is every touch point you have with the customer, every step is important and the single most exciting opportunity. This is the primary way to differentiate your organisation from competitors coming years; be fun, offer easy business and pleasure to customers. Customers don’t care how they are in contact with you, they just want to be in contact smoothly.
Three top priorities
The tree digital related areas that are top priorities for 2015 were Targeting and personalization, Content optimization and Social media engagement according to the survey. Also omnichannel personalization will become a reality in 2015. Omnichannel, the ability to connect with anyone on any channel, needs to have offline and online data to communicate to work.
Geo-targeting signposts will be a new era in mobile and e.g. iBeacons is an interesting opportunity to understand the customer better and personalize communication. There’s a lot of opportunities here! Although not many agree to the thought that their companies have infrastructure to collect the data they need. I guess companies that offer big data and analysis solutions have good years ahead.
Mobile optimization and personalization improve engagement and conversions. I guess we know that already but according to this survey conversation rate for tablets are almost twice as smartphone conversation rate. Quite interesting were Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s use of apps and push notifications. Their mobile app conversion rate ended up with 5X higher than mobile web and mobile apps drove 80 percent with only 20 percent of visits. Push notifications for mobile apps drove 11 percent increase in ticket purchases and 142 percent (!) boost in time spent. So, time to launch an app if you don’t have one?!
Relevant and personalized
The future will give us many interesting ways to communicate with customers. Be relevant and offer personalized content will be expected. I see big data and geo-targeting as big opportunities if used in a smart way. Those that are worried of this technology, I think they need to have this explained to them to make sure they understand it better. Then they’ll se all the possibilities there are to find ways to work smart and relevant.
Personalize, relevant, big data, click to buy and apps. Will this be the most important for 2015?
VMG 