Right as you start getting used to writing 2014 on your checks, a whole new year comes around and with it, more new things you need to learn besides writing ‘2015’.

Innovative marketing strategies during 2014 made it an exciting year for growing businesses. We want your next year to be a fantastic year of growth. Here are the 2015 marketing trends and predictions so you can put them into practice early:

Brand Journalism

It is predicted that by 2015 the press release will be dead, and that a company’s main source for distributing business news will not be through conventional news media, but through the company newsroom.

Combined with the distribution power of social media; newsrooms are the most efficient way to inform your audience about your latest business updates. They streamline the communication process and give companies the power to say what they want, how they want, when they want.

Consumer Empathy

Marketing gurus across the nation have been condoning businesses for not using “human-speak”. In other words; crafting all of their marketing content to promote a product and sell, sell, sell.

Research shows that actually engaging your customers on a human level, using their language, understanding the buyer experience and treating them as individuals is better for sales; while strictly promotional content gets largely ignored.

Pay-to-play

Paid promotions on social media, and pay-per-click ads on search engines are the inevitable future of marketing. As consumers migrate from traditional to digital media sources, demand for online advertizing will increase, and so will the cost.

The best way to prepare for this future is to allot a portion of your marketing budget to paid promotions; and while companies with deep pockets will get a significantly greater amount of attention, all the money in the world cannot compete with quality content. Learn how to combine paid advertizing with engaging organic content and your business could shift the balance between wealthy companies and clever ones.

Visual Storytelling

A picture is worth a thousand words … or a thousand likes, shares, pins, retweets, etc. Not only is visual content more appealing to the eye, but consumers absorb more information faster from a single image than a paragraph of text.

Share emotionally appealing stories with your audience through pictures and videos.

Mobile content

Have you looked at your website from a mobile device? Do you have an app that makes you even more accessible to your customers? These are two questions you’ll want to answer by next year.

Most of your consumers barely spend an hour on their computers, but they spend nearly every waking moment with their phone. You are tasked with creating a website, marketing content and a purchasing portal that can be conveniently accessed from one place. Good luck!

Need some help? Please, contact us…we can help you prepare for next year.