INTRODUCTION:

According to eMarketer over $11 billion was spent in Australia on Advertising last year (2014).

Incredibly over 50% of that was spent on Digital Channels.

In 2015 this growth shows no sign of slowing with spend predicted to increase by a further 10%.Another $500 million.

And If you look at mobile advertising by itself that spend is predicted to grow by over 60%! See the Emarketer Adspendtool for global spend and more insights into the local market.

So the question is ..where should brands, businesses and marketers be looking to spend their budgets in 2015. Are you spending at least half your marketing dollars online?

How will you #BeSeenIn2015?

We are constantly hearing/reading that “My Facebook posts aren’t being seen and now I have to pay to play on Facebook” or “We tried Google Adwords but it was expensive/hardwork” or worse still..didn’t work at all.

A successful Digital Strategy in 2015 should be made up of several interdependent components – and whilst on the face of it running each one is fairy simple – when you are running a business or marketing department, it takes up a lot of time and time is the one thing we have the least of.

More and more businesses are outsourcing their digital marketing to specialist digital marketing agencies as they simply dont have the time to build, manage, analyse and optimise their digital campaigns. Whilst we like to keep things simple we still feel there are at keast 9 areas that you can focus on to ensure Digital and Business success in 2015.

2015:

So let’s take a look at what we believe the key ingredients are for the next 12 months

1: Great Content…AWESOME Imagery

Interesting content is a top 3 reason people follow brands on social media. We cannot stress enough the importance of looking good. As most of us literally live online these days, good looking and eye catching images can make or break your ability to stand out.

Blurred Images, Outlines and Long Shadows are just some of the trending types of imagery you should be looking at to #BeSeenIn2015. More info on trending imagery from Shutterstock can be found here. Whilst Facebook is a great tool to diseminate images along with interesting posts – Pinterest is also a valuable (and undersestimated) social media platform to drive traffic to your site. Remember each platfom has their own optimal image sizing to get the best results. We’ll be writing more about this in our next update so don’t forget to follow this post for more updates.

2: Social

Amazingly only 10% of Australian businesses have a Social Media presence. Yet those that are doing it well see strong levels of engagement and loyal brand advocates – think GoPro, RedBull and our very own Guy Leech Australia’s number 1 Fitness Guy. While Facebook is the Gorilla in the room, a good social media strategy is to be on all of the main platforms including Google +,Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and without a doubt LinkedIn. While Twitter doesn’t have the following here in Australia that it does in the US and elsewhere it should still be included as part of your integrated digital strategy. One of the key things to remember with Social is to drive people back to your website so you can capture email addresses and build that database.

3: Paid Advertising

As organic reach on Facebook has dropped off and Facebook has made it harder to reach your fanbase – it really comes down to creating compelling content – which is.. let’s face it time consuming, or just one of those things you never get to – the alternative is Paying to play. We have seen great success with paid advertising campaigns on Facebook with high CTR’s and low cost per clicks – a great way to build your database by sending visits off Facebook to your website landing page. A well crafted Google Adwords/Display is still the fastest way to deliver qualified visits to your site. We’ll talk more about what happens once you have visitors to your site in the Conversions section of this blog. And will be writing a separate piece on Paid Advertising as part of our #BeSeenIn2015 campaign.

4: Brand Personality

Why have people decided to follow you on any of the social media platforms we discussed above? Or subscribed to your email marketing? Well hopefully its because you have a great brand story and personality. We can’t stress the importance of the 80/20 rule with Social Media. Only 1 in 5 posts should be about product. Sharing the personality of your business via social media indicates authenticity and gives an insight to your followers as to what makes your business tick as a brand. Videos or photos of the team or team members doing something..anything..will also get more engagement than a post about why people should buy your product. Our recent work with BMW Sydney showed the value of posting localised and “in house” content with the launch of their iSeries electric vehicles.

5: Mobile

Mobile ad spend is skyrocketing – with growth of over 60% predicted in Australia this year. The ever increasing use of mobiles allows marketers to target people over a longer period in the day – during different activities such as work, rest, play and research time.

With wearable tech ie. Apple’s iWatch shipping in 2015 – it’s not just the end of the desktop as we know it but the end of the desktop full stop. While sales and conversions are lower on Mobile – Mobile is where research begins..how are you looking on mobile? Try this mobile emulator that works across nearly all handsets.

7: Video

When Salesforce employed the use of an explainer video on their website they saw conversions rates increase 20%. Video has become a useful part of marketing, it shows people how your product or service works in a way that text or images cannot. If you are running an ecommerce site research shows video can increase cart size by over 150%. Last year we helped launch Ready Fund Go, an all Australian Crowdfunding Platform for business with this great little explainer video

8: Conversions

Here’s the thing – conversions on e-commerce are low, really low. Research shows that conversions in many e-commerce shops are in the range of 2 percent and below, and if you’re looking at 5 percent, hey, that’s not bad at all. But that still leaves us with a whopping 95 percent to 98 percent of visitors leaving your site empty handed. There are 3 ways you can improve these low rates:

• Onsite – with Overlays
• Email/App – if the user has your app then woohoo.. you can prompt them with a message straight from the app if they abandon your cart. No app? Hopefully you have their email address…you do capture email addresses right? You can then email them with an abandoned cart message offering free shipping or another added bonus.
• Retargeting – No contact data or purchase from the customer? No problem! If the visitor filled a cart, offer an incentive to purchase the products in that cart. If they were only browsing the website, offer recommended products with an incentive. The risk here is that your profit margin may be affected if you offer it to all visitors and they understand your game plan.

9: Reporting

So you’re doing all of the above with varying degrees of success – but what does success really look like? The beauty (and curse) of digital is that it provides endless insights and data so you can see exactly where your best business is coming from. Unfortunately the majority of business owners (and marketing managers) are too time poor to look at their reports and analytics in minute detail. Thankfully there are a number of platforms available that provide automated reports in a dashboard style layout. Platforms such as Adstage for managing ROI and Analytics, WooRank for SEO, Nuvi for social listening (although it’s heavily focused on Twitter). Regardless of what platform you use dipping into your Google analytics or Facebook Insights once a week or at least fortnightly provides invaluable data on how you are performing online. Or “on the line” as we say.

10: Optimisation

• Video set to boom – $10 billion will be spent on Video Advertising in 2015.
• Wearable Tech.
• Crowdfunding.
• Mobile Optimisation getting better..much better.
• Internet Of Things…yes we know ..but it is coming!
• Full Screen Media.
• Personalisation and 1 to 1 marketing.
• Microtargeting and hyper-segmentation.
• Off topic but …Mad Max and Star Wars – The Force Awakens.

The final word:

To many of you the above points may well be Digital Marketing 101 – but to the rest of you we hope you have discovered something or that we have reaffirmed some of the points that you knew but dont pay enough attention to. As a digital marketing agency our role is to start with the business objectives and work our way back to things like cost per acquisition, lifetime value of a customer and conversaion rates. From there it becomes easier to decide on budgets and where to spend dollars. We allow at least 4 weeks before we start to form any real opinions on where success is coming from then optimise accordingly during month 2 so that by month 3 we have some solid data on things like cost per click conversion rates and cost per acquisition. From there we can start to plan ahead for our clients business.

If you’d like to see how we work and get some valuable insights at no charge – hop on to our free digital health check and we’ll come back to you with 5 key insights into how you can improve your website performance. From there we can look at your social media presence, as well as any other online areas you need support or advice on.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog so you can be alerted to updates in the #BeSeenIn2015 series.