Home – New › Forums › Marketing mastery › What’s HOT for 2014… my thoughts… what’s yours?
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January 3, 2014 at 1:57 am #986197Up::0
Here we are… It’s our new and exciting year… a year to make money… a year to leave our competitors behind.
I think all you have to do is take Action with your marketing sooner than later and you’ll be off and running.
Soo… what’s Hot?
Email Marketing: It’s still a must in your marketing plan because email is the blood of the Internet. It’s the most established business tool but it’s also used poorly as a marketing tool… so there’s plenty of opportunity there.
Apps: I don’t need to pull out my crystal ball for this one… the whole world is going mobile. A huge number of local searches are performed on mobile devices and that mobile community is going to want fingertip access to their favourite restaurants, their trusted electrician and one day, even their doctor. If your customers have your app then you can send push notifications and push notifications are read more than 90% of the time.
Video: Another no brainer but sadly neglected like a weed. With YouTube pumping away as a major Search Engine there’s every reason to embrace video.
And…
Digital Publishing: Over 160 million iPads, over 1.5 billion Smartphones and Tablets outselling PCs.There’s millions to be made in digital publishing if you know the business model… and it doesn’t cost the Earth.
Four ‘HOT’ spots… four key areas for my clients.
I’ve shared FS members… hoping this might become a marketing stimulation thread to get 2014 really firing…
What are you doing with your Marketing in 2014?
Have you mapped out a marketing plan yet for the next three months?
January 4, 2014 at 11:10 pm #1156741Up::0There are two areas that are either hot now or becoming very important.
1) Mobile phones and tablet computers
Looking at one local business account I was tracking yesterday, getting about 6000 visits a month. 39% of site visits and sales enquiry coming from mobiles and tablets- split roughly evenly between phones and tablets. (Up substantially on the previous month.)Suggestion: Make sure your site is set up either with a mobile plugin or using responsive design. Install click to call and maps.
Do this before worrying about an App. Apps are better suited to certain types of business with a lot of repeat business and mobile commerce. Possibly a Pizza shop but probably not a plumber or restaurant with a single outlet.
2) Google +
Like it or not, Google is making it virtually mandatory for a local business to maintain a Google account and a Google + page.
Three reasons:
– Google Maps listings are important for local business organic rankings
– Google is moving towards becoming a “recommendations engine”. Google + reviews will drive this.
– Businesses need to start developing Authority in their market niche through publishing content. The Google account allows content attribution.My Suggestions: Claim your Google + page if it already exists, if not create one. Get going with content marketing
January 5, 2014 at 8:03 am #1156742Up::0Marketing is not my caper, but I believe you guy’s are probably on the money.
My interest is in what’s hot for 2014 is connected, but from a technical perspective.
Where “responsive design” was the biggy in 2013, I believe 2014 is the start of a major paradigm shift in how content and engagement is delivered on the web.
For many types of businesses, the old HTML with SQL server-side queries (al la WordPress and others) website, just won’t cut it.
Why? They’re just too slow to interact in real time (which is what consumers are running too, via mobile).
Google believes it too, they’re getting involved with a range of projects, all aimed at providing “rich user experiences” (read not clunky).
Have a look at AngularJS, a Google open source project … then check out some examples, to see what’s being done with it … not one conventional server side language in the mix (or framework).
Check out the concept of “deep linking” with Angular. Infinite linking depth in a site must have ramifications for SEO and marketing types.
Push notification, emails, and real time interaction will be expected out of the box for most sites and is becoming trivial to implement with the new technology frameworks that are appearing.
These frameworks are appearing at a rapid rate, and there’s no shortage of funds to back them. Meteor.js is just one, and recently received $15 mill. in first round funding.
The merging of what we now see as an “app”, with what we’ve known as a website, will be the big story in 2014, IMHO.
Anyone in online business, that doesn’t at least watch the “space” may get caught with prehistoric tools to manage their online presence.
January 5, 2014 at 9:02 am #1156743Up::0A mobile responsive site has to be a number one need, but for marketing it is all about content.
Generating good content and distributing it across all the channels which are relevant to your audience.
January 5, 2014 at 9:23 pm #1156744Up::0estim8, post: 180738 wrote:Marketing is not my caper, but I believe you guy’s are probably on the money.My interest is in what’s hot for 2014 is connected, but from a technical perspective.
Where “responsive design” was the biggy in 2013, I believe 2014 is the start of a major paradigm shift in how content and engagement is delivered on the web.
For many types of businesses, the old HTML with SQL server-side queries (al la WordPress and others) website, just won’t cut it.
Why? They’re just too slow to interact in real time (which is what consumers are running too, via mobile).
Google believes it too, they’re getting involved with a range of projects, all aimed at providing “rich user experiences” (read not clunky).
Have a look at AngularJS, a Google open source project … then check out some examples, to see what’s being done with it … not one conventional server side language in the mix (or framework).
Check out the concept of “deep linking” with Angular. Infinite linking depth in a site must have ramifications for SEO and marketing types.
Push notification, emails, and real time interaction will be expected out of the box for most sites and is becoming trivial to implement with the new technology frameworks that are appearing.
These frameworks are appearing at a rapid rate, and there’s no shortage of funds to back them. Meteor.js is just one, and recently received $15 mill. in first round funding.
The merging of what we now see as an “app”, with what we’ve known as a website, will be the big story in 2014, IMHO.
Anyone in online business, that doesn’t at least watch the “space” may get caught with prehistoric tools to manage their online presence.Very interesting. I just spend an hour looking at the examples shown.
How do you think that could affect Small Business? I could see a range of applications for data driven websites, but for the what do you think could be the ramifications of the regular cafe owner?
Push notification, emails, and real time interaction will be expected out of the box for most sites and is becoming trivial to implement with the new technology frameworks that are appearing.
How does these new frameworks handle push notifications? You have to install an app to use these feature? Sorry for all the questions but I find this fascinating.
January 5, 2014 at 10:13 pm #1156745Up::0MatthewKeath, post: 180762 wrote:Very interesting. I just spend an hour looking at the examples shown.How do you think that could affect Small Business? I could see a range of applications for data driven websites, but for the what do you think could be the ramifications of the regular cafe owner?
How does these new frameworks handle push notifications? You have to install an app to use these feature? Sorry for all the questions but I find this fascinating.
Still coming to grips with it to some extent. As mentioned in another post, January is dedicated to sorting it out.
The biggest one for me, especially with Meteor, is there’s virtually no latency between the server and the client, everything updates real time like a native app … gets a bit boring for the non techs, but in part it’s achieved by putting a mini MongoDB on the browser, what the user see’s is an instantaneous update of their input … so fast they can miss the data change.
There’s no app to install, the site becomes the app.
For a “brochure” type site, probably no advantage, for your cafe eg? Maybe real time bookings with no server lag … selection of menu and pre order, prior to arrival?
I think it’ll be up to the imagination of the client requirements.
AngularJS is a bit different, it’s a client side MVC framework that works completely differently to something like jQuery in manipulating the DOM, but achieves more with less hassle and keeps the HTML clean. The big one for me with this is, you can pull any “view” or page fragment, from anywhere and display it without screwing up, kind of means everything in a site is potentially linked to everything else, no matter how big the site and can be mashed up any way you like without screwing the context in the DOM.
I see there’s already a move on to provide AngularJS in WordPress
Short of getting into a boring (for most) conversation about web sockets and asynchronous non blocking event loops … I’ll leave it there for this thread.
Cheers
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