Digital Marketing Trends and Predictions From The Industry Experts

Unpredictable! Spontaneous! Volatile! and, the list goes on and on….

These are some of the most common adjectives used to describe the nature of Digital Marketing. No matter how hard the webmasters try to tame this wild beast, it always comes up with something which is beyond their catch.

This is the reason that answering the what, where, why, and when of digital marketing continues to remain a big puzzle for even the most accomplished digital marketers. With bits and pieces scattered all over the place, marketers continue to put their best efforts to understand predict the future. And, as Digital Marketing continues to unfold the mysteries hidden behind its various facades, the thirst of knowledge amongst marketers also continues to rise, with webmasters coming up with their predictions, words of wisdom and all sorts of help for people.

So, the guys over at ProofHub decided to get in touch with industry leaders and asked them certain questions on Digital Marketing trends and predictions for 2015.

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Neil Patel

Founder of Quick Sprout

It’s becoming more competitive as time goes on. Industries like law, insurance and finance are already too competitive for newcomers to enter without having big financial pockets. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Owen Powis

CEO of Wordtracker

Digital marketing faces a greater challenge as it becomes increasingly prevalent and effective. We must balance the  needs of the marketing person with a consumer’s right to privacy. This has been tackled in some part by legislation and     will likely continue to be. If, as marketers, we abuse the tools that are available to us to retarget and collect data those laws will, rightly so, become more restrictive.

The cost of paid media is also an increasing concern, and although it does drive better targeted campaigns by necessity,it   does also further push the small business out of the space. As media spend increases the leftover budget for running costs must decrease in order to maintain a healthy ROI. Ultimately this leads to more ‘budget’ agencies operating who either do   not deliver or use poor quality tactics. This doesn’t benefit the business or the consumer but is likely to be a growing issue as paid media becomes both more necessary and expensive. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Sandeep Kashyap

Founder & CEO of ProofHub

The biggest challenge that lies ahead in digital marketing is to develop content for fragmented marketing channels (social media platforms). With Mixed Media becoming staple for digital marketers, it is the right time to amalgamate social media endeavors with content marketing strategies and satisfy the information hungry consumers. As the users continue to become more diverse, it is high time for digital marketers to acclimatize and come up with innovative approaches to satisfy their hunger for information.

The key to success still lies in making your voice heard. The only difference is that there are plenty of more channels now, and you need to be smart enough to recognize which ones work and which ones don’t. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Rand Fishkin

Co-Founder of Moz

Digital often feels less tangible and less observable than traditional marketing, and thus can be more difficult to sell, particularly to those who are used to feeling something physical (a magazine, newspaper, product, etc) or experiencing media in a familiar way (TV, radio, in-person, etc). Digital is also, often, more temporal and less direct — many web marketing investments are only a part of a longer, multi-step journey to a conversion, and although measurable, may track less directly to that conversion. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Nischal Shetty

Founder of Crownfireapp

The biggest challenge is digital marketing’s constantly changing and evolving landscape. You cannot afford to ever get complacent. Google’s pushing a new algorithm today, there’s a brand new social network tomorrow and there’s an awesome growth hack revealed the day after. You have to stay on top of all of these at all times and not everyone finds it easy. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Aseem 

Co-Founder & CEO of Socedo

The huge potential for reach can be a double-edged sword for a lot of businesses. With such a large audience and pool of potential leads, it can be difficult to locate the right audience for you. Digital marketing provides so many channels and methods in which to create and distribute content, but if that content doesn’t make it in front of interested people, it simply falls on deaf ears. Marketers need to equip themselves with ways to cut through that digital noise. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Jon Ferrara

Founder & CEO of Nimble

The challenges faced by digital marketing is that we live in an overconnected and over-communicated world where everyone is busy interrupting customers with BS. The traditional forms of Mad Men marketing no longer work. Companies need to stop yelling at customers about how great their product and services are and instead need to start teaching customers how they can be great. People buy a better version of themselves, not great products.
If you teach people to fish, they will figure out how to sell you fishing poles. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Greg Kazulak

Co-Founder & CEO of Positionly

The biggest challenge that I see in digital marketing these days is in providing more tools for collecting crucial data and analyzing it in a smart way. Every single marketing decision should be data-driven and yet we still miss solutions that are affordable for smaller companies and easy to use (even for newbies).

In the near future, we will see more tools dedicated to content marketing. We will miss solutions that help in planning, creating, promoting and analyzing performance of content that we create on a daily basis. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Samantha Yeh

Product Marketing Manager of Bitly

There are many important components to a great digital marketing strategy and a handful of different platforms that digital marketers can use every day to build a holistic understanding of their initiatives. Building a great team that understands all of these components and the value each piece drives is challenging, but crucial. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

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Dema Zlotin

CEO of Rio Seo

Two common challenges in digital marketing today are choosing the correct approach and being able to measure results. Beyond traditional SEO and SEM, search is increasingly mobile and local and requires highly relevant hyperlocal content. Digital marketing tools and best practices have to evolve to manage this complexity to drive the best ROI from these contextual focused campaigns.

Now that you’ve read what the experts have to say, you can go ahead and plan your digital marketing strategy in accordance with the shared advice. After reading this, one thing is clear for sure and that is ‘we are going to see a frameshift in digital marketing strategies this year, with more orientation towards making the marketing gimmicks more human as compared to the old school mantra to Just Sell’. To read it in detail, download the paper from here.

This post was originally published on the ProofHub blog.