Tune in to tune up your marketing plan for the new year with the best marketing agency Nashville.
It’s that time of year again–the holidays–and though they’re belly full with warm sentiments and the endless inpour of sweet indulgences that just seem to greet our mouths at every turn, these final weeks leading up to the new year can be a heavy load to carry. While Santa is making his list (hopefully he’s got that well underway by now) and checking it twice, companies worldwide are in the 4th quarter home stretch–feverishly working long hours to get projects wrapped up for their clients and new products out to launch, all before that big disco ball comes elegantly crashing down over Times Square and glasses clink to ring in the 1st of the new year just a little over a week from now.
As we get ready to switch out our heavily scribbled on 2012 calendars for the brand spanking new 2013 (a number that stands invincible against the Mayans…sorry guys, you can’t always be right) we at the best marketing agency Nashville begin to focus our thoughts forward on what the next year holds. Some of us stroke our chins or twirl our hair in wonder, while others gear up, buckle down and analyze the year past in order to forecast what lies ahead. Of course, like the pig-flying, creative influencers we are, you’ll definitely find our desks deserted and us busy at the drawing board in this next week and on into the new year.
Sure maybe it’s too premature to predict what the year 2013 holds, what the marketing industry will look like, who the big players will be and what is and what’s not going to be effective, maybe our predictions and game strategizing won’t prove true at all, but we’re willing to take the leap of faith and prepare our tool box for what we think we’ll need to effectively captain the Creativetopia ship and navigate the waters for our clients. At the very least we’ll have prepared ourselves to the best of our ability. After all it’s better to have a starting point then to dive into the new year blindly. From there it’s all about casting the line, pulling up anchor, seeing how the water flows and hoping that once we’ve passed GO we can collect some money for ourselves and our clients.
Right now we all want to be the next global YouTube sensation, the next hot product people are clawing over at the store and news anchors, bloggers and high profile corporate identities are raving about, or to be voted the most thought provoking, innovative marketing agency Nashville. When drafting our New Year’s resolutions, we set our sights high but what will be the key in achieving them? Here’s a little taste of what we think is on tap for 2013:
Content without context is mute
There’s been a lot of push this year in the marketing realm for quality content. According to the pros (your favorite marketing agency Nashville included), content for content sake won’t get you too far. We’ve seen a shift already this year as marketers focus more on producing good, useful content and not just a compilation of words and ideas spammed with keywords. Going forward, the key to effective SEO is about writing with a goal in mind and identifying that goal before you even begin to tap away at the keyboard. We need to ask ourselves: Am I writing with a purpose? Who is the target audience? What are my biggest traffic sources and top performing posts? What are the best keywords to optimize for?
Big Focus on Big Data
Big Data has been a trending topic for over a year now but we believe 2013 is it’s big calling. There’s tons and tons of data sifting through the digital realm, all coming from a diverse range of sources including social media sites, digital pictures, location data, etc. All of our gadgets and devices are constantly generating data pertaining to our on and offline activities. Big Data is essentially a compilation of all this information. Now that’s a gold mine for anyone who can get their hands on it especially for marketers whose jobs depend on knowing their customer base well enough to predict their behaviors. In 2013, as new software increasingly allows for better collecting, sifting and sorting of this data, solutions will emerge that offer big data applications to help with day-to-day marketing campaigns so that marketers like us can can gain a better understanding of our target market and therefore develop much more effective ways of reaching them.
Inbound is, well, in!
As a term, outbound might sound much more forceful but it’s the idea of going inbound (inbound marketing that is) that’s really gaining our attention. While just a few years back marketing automation was the hot tactic, today inbound marketing is the way of the future. The whole notion of scheduling a message to go out on a routine basis via an email or marketing database sounds nice (and easy at that!) but 2013 is about really nurturing leads through relevant content, value-added offers and social engagement. We don’t to want spam our customers or make them feel like they’re talking to a machine. The inbound marketing approach is to earn people’s interests by drawing them in with captivating informative content instead of buying their attention. In order to deliver the ultimate customer value, marketers need to be sure not to lose the most integral piece of their marketing strategy–the client customer relationship.
Marketing with a Game Face
As the best marketing agency Nashville, we believe experience is everything. Everyone loves games–they’re fun, they’re engaging and there’s usually some sort of incentive. With marketing being all about the user experience, marketing professionals have been using games to their advantage for over a decade to advertise related products and services. In 2013, the whole notion of “gamification” is going to reach new heights. While we will continue to see product placement in online games, marketers will be taking their message to the next level by building it into a complete interactive experience that really sparks consumer attention and makes marketing enjoyable instead of something they absolutely dread and try to avoid. The idea behind this new more interactive approach to how marketing is deployed and consumed, is to increase the probability of content sticking in the minds of consumers. If you’ve seen the awesome capabilities of HTML5 you’ll certainly understand what we’re talking about.
GooglePlus and Google Authorship is key to SEO ranking
“But none of my friends are on Google Plus!” Yeah, yeah we’ve heard it before but if you know anything about the inner workings of the internet you’ll see that everything works very much hand in hand. For years SEO and social media have been slowly intersecting to form a bigger entity referred to as “social search”. Basically social media and SEO are working together to push content. With Google as the biggest content and SEO powerhouse, and you trying to rise to the top of the first Google page search for your industry, it would be foolish not to hop on the platform early…whether your friends are there or not. By building out a Google Plus profile and setting up Google Authorship, Google will recognize you in more ways than one and will therefore slowly begin to trust you as a quality source of content and help you stand out from the other search results. You already have one friend waiting for you–the best marketing agency Nashville would love for you to join our Google Plus circle!
Thank you to all of our clients for being so great! Have a wonderful holiday and happy New Year! If your company or brand is looking to boost its online presence in 2013 Creativetopia–the best marketing agency Nashville–is happy to help you kick your marketing plan into gear! Hit us up at the first of the year 🙂