What are the Digital Trends of 2015?

We have discussed a whole lot about what the digital trends of the coming year will be (Article in Spanish), but at Territorio creativo, we have reserved our opinion. Why wait? Because our instinct motivated us to think, debate and arrive at a consensus conclusion before we could share a definitive view on our TcBlog.

Every new year, we find it essential to take a break and think about what things might be changing in the digital world. Because not considering what’s coming next is the easiest way to stay behind and not to live to tell the tale.

Today, dear reader, we share with you the list of 12 trends that we believe will leave a digital mark on the next 12 months. And what’s more, we have also dared to arrange them according to relevance, impact and immediacy. The ranking that we propose in the next couple of lines has been drawn up based on a survey conducted amongst over 50 Social Media experts.

Are you prepared to adapt to the new wave of digital transformation (Article in Spanish)?

In ascending order, here we go!

12. Customer-Centric Apps

We understand how Customer-Centric the new generation of applications is – conceived and designed exclusively to meet the needs of the users. Brands no longer seek only to create applications to better sell themselves or to cover certain business segments, but will go in search of loyalty through much more humane and more useful authentic experiences. The formula is simple: if you solve a problem for me, or if you make some daily process of mine easier, I will remember you even more. Do your applications really put people at the center?

11. Marketing Automation

The hyper-optimization in the generation and management of leads will be increasingly more important in the digital environment. Control, adaptation, monitoring and the purchase attributes remain the pillars of power to highlight the real ROI of digital actions. And what about Big Data? The cross sectioning of big data will produce all that is necessary to reach only those customers of value. Why waste time, effort and money impacting users with more than questionable conversion ratios?

10. Co-creation

Increasingly, there will be more and more brands that will engage their communities in making decisions in the promotional field or in product development. Indeed, making them feel like they are a part of the brand is the best way to connect with them, but even more so – and this is another more obvious reason that has been ignored for a while – because “Nobody knows more about the community than the community itself.” What does your company do to empower to your consumers?

9. Private Social Networking

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram – What do all these social networks have in common? A consideration for the removal of oneself from the actual community. The new generation of users begin to opt for private channels on which they are able to communicate freely. It is no secret that WhatsApp is in the spotlight of all the brands as the next private social network on which to be. Will this be the year of its final takeoff? Your brand should certainly be waiting for this.

8. Own Communities

Did someone say free communication? This could be the next move for all those brands that have begun to witness the decline of their organic reach on platforms like Facebook. What can you do when you discover that you do not reach even up to 5% of your community? Turning to new spaces of communication could be the answer: platforms that are closer to the user, more useful, and have the propensity for co-creation are something that we are very likely to see in the next couple of months. And what if brands sponsor communities instead of events?

7. Social Paid Media “to buy”

It has hardly been a few months since Twitter integrated a social button for direct purchases, with which just one click is enough to acquire a product from their platform. And Telepizza and Movistar surprised us last year with a total integration of their payment channel and the 140-character social media platform. If 2013 and 2014 were the years of the establishment of social customer service, will 2015 be the year of purchases through social media? Very soon, being on these platforms will not only be essential in order to strengthen our brand image, but it could also affect our sales strategy more than ever.

6. iBeacons

The half-point of this ranking is marked rather aptly, by new technologies of geolocalization. iBeacons are already capable of getting users’ geolocal information in real time and it allows us to know what people are doing and where they are doing it, and generally, where they move to at any time, by collecting data from their mobile devices. If we add to this the knowledge of the user that we can get through social media channels, brands should begin to be able to generate hyper-personalized and hyper-precise effects, in terms of time and place. Will your brand be able to launch its messages in the best possible moment?

5. Social Visual Influence

We have arrived at our Top 5 with a trend that focuses on visual experiences. The search for brand ambassadors brings forth a diffusion strategy that more and more brands are increasingly adopting. But, can your brand truly adapt itself to the new world of Social Visual Influence? YouTube and Instagram have come to change the rules of the game, and to bring to light the most powerful and most effective digital influencers in the history of communication. Some of these Social Visual Influencers account for averages of more than a million views on their videos, and also, connect with their fans, now better and quicker than ever, with attractive, dynamic and very, very viral content.

4. Content Marketing

Content, yes, but is your brand prepared to develop a 100% effective content strategy? In a digital environment in which users have become more demanding than ever, these brands that do not publish their own compelling content are destined to disappear. If you still haven’t, 2015 is the year in which you’d better begin to consider the professionalization and repositioning of your content. For every second that passes, you could be losing out on a huge piece of the social media cake.

3. Social CRM

What do we mean by Social Customer Relationship Management? It is the obtaining of unique and definitive records of customers through social data mining, in order to develop communication strategies and key actions that will have the greatest possible impact. It is the glue that binds any self-respecting digital strategy and, without it, it is impossible to know our community, to be capable of providing value, to perform the cross sectioning of data necessary to develop our online campaigns, or to at least set up other integrated strategies. What is your brand doing to adapt itself to the new strategic needs of social data capture?

2. Omni-channel communication

Online environments? Offline? Increasingly, the line that separates the two realities is getting thinner, such that, in the minds of many native digital users, they begin to appear as one single world. In fact, the adaptation of brands to actions and multichannel and multi-purchase experiences seems to be a must in the age that we live in. That which remains relegated to the offline world has numbered days, as it essentially awaits its impending move to the digital environment. Start thinking of actions that unite the best of each environment and raises your strategy with an online-offline philosophy at once!

1. Real-Time Marketing

I’m sure that you are tired of hearing about this. Why is Real Time Marketing (Article in Spanish) our number one? Because it is the most “real” of all, and because, if your brand is not prepared to begin to use it in 2015, you might miss the train of social relevance forever. In an environment in which paid advertising on social media is growing faster than ever, and in which the advertising timeline of our users suffers from an information overload, brands are starting to realize that they are no longer leading the conversations, but rather, they must adapt to the conversations that their own users launch in real time. Therefore, a consistent tone and style will allow us to empathize and will allow them to gain relevance from three very simple ingredients: brand positioning, creativity, and relevance.

Is your brand ready to use their ingenuity at breakneck speed?