#2015marketing

2015 Marketing

Trends and Predictions

What to look out for in 2015?

Written by Bruno Berthezene, Solocal Group UK Country Manager

About Solocal Group

As the market specialist in cost effective multichannel marketing, Solocal Group supports businesses with the online to in-store customer

journey by connecting customers with brands. With annual revenues exceeding £800 million, Solocal Group is among the leading European

digital marketing groups. Its portfolio of solutions help over 650,000 clients – SMEs and larger companies - engage with customers and drive

online traffic in-store through solutions such as display advertising, web-to-store platform, real-time online appointment booking.

About the author

Bruno is Solocal Group UK’ Country Manager and also Solocal Group’s global Partnerships and Business Development Senior Manager. As

such, he develops partnerships between Solocal Group and digital companies, large groups or start-ups. Bruno has been part of Solocal

Group (since 2001. He has successively worked on Strategic Planning, Strategic Research and Intelligence, M&A, General Management for

123deal (a Solocal Group service) before moving to Business Development and Partnerships functions in 2011. Bruno graduated in

Marketing and Strategy at Paris Dauphine University and Grenoble Political Studies Institute.

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4 predictions on marketing trends for 2015

#1 From multiscreen to ubiquitous internet devices

#2 Content and social meets advertising

#3 Taking the multichannel customer journey seriously

#4 The rise of the seamless transaction

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TREND #1 – From multiscreen to ubiquitous Internet devices

The recent years have seen the rise of the multiscreen / multi-

device trend: from desktop through laptop, console, mobile,

tablet to phablet, each UK consumer uses an increasing

number of devices sometimes simultaneously (second

screen, third screen). Mobile and tablet have become the

dominating source of traffic for many internet brands but the

customer experience provided on these devices is still not

always adapted to the form factor. Additionally, the

fragmented usage of devices has been an issue for

businesses to have a single view of the user and therefore

makes it difficult to attribute conversion to a specific

interaction.

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TREND #1 – From multiscreen to ubiquitous Internet devices

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2015 will be the year where brands move to provide the same

experience on mobile devices that consumers receive on PCs and in

store.

In 2015, we will begin to see mobile payment take off as a result of m-

payment service launches such as Apple Pay.

2015 will see progress on multi-device tracking through the

development of emerging cross-device monitoring techniques,

including ultrasonic contactless technology.

There will be a booming wave of smart devices, such as wearables

including connected glasses, smart watches and Internet of Things

enabling devices. Whether all of these emerging connected devices will

prove to be successful in 2015 is not certain, but those that are will

considerably enrich our lives and make the internet even more

ubiquitous in our lives due to the relative simplicity of smart devices.

1.1 MOBILE USER EXPERIENCE

1.2 M-PAYMENT

1.3 CROSS-DEVICE TRACKING

1.4 SMART DEVICES

TREND #2 – Content and social meets advertising

Growth in display advertising will be mostly driven by the growth of

mobile devices, especially tablets, and by the explosion of video as an

online advertising form.

Ads will be more relevant than ever given the targeting possibilities

provided by data that allow advertisers to push messages only for what

the consumer is most likely to be interested in. However, at the same

time, advertising will face the emergence of ad blockers, browser

extensions downloaded by users and disabling display ads. As a result,

2015 will be the year where even more relevancy should be look for,

allowing advertisers and marketers to better use the untapped data to

its full potential which will therefore make users happy that they are

being reached with relevant content.

After retargeting, the new wave of data use in display and search

advertising will be pre-targeting, which can be defined as pushing ads

with messages based on a customer higher propensity to purchase a

product/service, this being based on behaviour data cross-analysis.

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2.1 MOBILE DISPLAY ADVERTISING

2.2 VIDEO ADVERTISING

2.3 RELEVANCY

2.4 PRE-TARGETING

TREND #2 – Content and social meets advertising

While 2015 will see advertising attribution improving (see above),

advertisers and publishers are both looking for a better evaluation of

the engagement of users generated by display advertising. More

relevant than the cost per click, more universal than the cost per action,

time-based display offerings (by which the advertiser will only need to

pay if the user has been exposed to the ad or has stayed on the

landing website for a minimum amount of time) will see a great traction.

While advertising is transitioning towards more relevancy, content

appears as a natural alternative to reach users. Native advertising and

branded content, which can be defined as inserting commercially

oriented content in an editorial environment, are emerging and will

develop in 2015. A risk might be a commercial content overload for the

users, resulting in the same rejection from a part of the users as for

internet advertising. However, Facebook has already shown that

significant revenue can be driven out of paid content amplification in a

social media environment, warranting visibility of sponsored content

within organic content, and Twitter seems to be going the same way. 7

2.5 TIME-BASED DISPLAY

OFFERINGS

2.6 NATIVE ADVERTISING –

BRANDED CONTENT

TREND #3 – Taking the multichannel customer journey seriously

The purchase funnel is being

increasingly looked after. In the past

decades, with the rise of digital, it has

become more much complex with the

rise of multiple touch points, from

‘discovery’ through ‘research’ and

‘engagement’ to ‘conversion’ into

purchase and post-purchase actions.

This means that taking the customer

right through from the start of the

journey to the purchase is more

challenging than ever and when that

happens, there is another challenge for

marketers and that is the attribution of

the purchase between the different

touch points.

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TREND #3 – Taking the multichannel customer journey seriously

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2015 will see the development of marketing automation techniques that

bring more sophistication in the optimisation of the conversion. The

increasing capacity to exploit the potential of data is obviously at the

core of this evolution towards real-time, behavioural, marketing.

Most of the purchases do not happen online but in-store so the

challenge of optimisation, attribution and marketing automation go

beyond the online activity. There is still much work to do on web-to-

store journey optimisation as many brands still don’t provide some of

the basics that customers have begun to expect. The most striking gap

relies on the disparity between customers’ expectations of store and

product location tools and the poor level of store locators on many

brand websites, not to mention the lack of mobile optimisation or the

scarce existence of a product locator. 2015 will be the year when a large

number of brands still lagging behind on mobile will catch up to finally

propose a mobile customer experience that will boost conversion,

online (m-commerce) and most importantly offline (mobile-to-store)

3.1 MARKETING AUTOMATION

3.2 WEB-TO-STORE

TREND #3 – Taking the multichannel customer journey seriously

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Personalisation and optimisation of in-site search and navigation will

also be growing trends, thanks to the increased use of consumer data.

Once the customer has arrived in-store, technologies like beacons or

ultrasonic tracking will help with attribution and marketing automation.

Stores, whether independent or part of a chain, will provide an

increasingly innovative in-store customer experience, with digital tools

(virtual trial, advice, queueing…) being used more and more, a trend

called phygital merging another trend called storytailing (examples of

recent innovations in retail can be found on the Local Ideas blog).

3.3 PERSONALISATION

3.4 WEB-TO-STORE TRACKING

3.5 PHYGITAL - STORYTAILING

TREND #4 – The rise of the seamless transaction

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The sharing economy, illustrated by companies such as AirBnB and

Uber, has paved the way for a world when buyers and sellers,

professionals or individuals, can connect and transact in a seamless,

real-time way. Car and house sharing, food, professional and local

services, there are no limits to what this model can apply to. And this is

only the beginning as an overwhelming number of new services are

following the trend, positioning themselves across all possible niches

you could imagine.

Hotel and restaurant booking has been around for a long time but other

service sectors are now realising the potential that they can also tap into

through online appointment booking too. 2014 has been the year of

acceleration for online appointment booking and 2015 should been the

year where this service really explodes into the mainstream. This is true

for a diverse range of sectors, such as health and beauty, car

maintenance, banking and finance and insurance, but also for the

fashion and luxury sectors due to the rise of personal shopping.

4.1 SHARING ECONOMY

4.2 APPOINTMENT BOOKING

TREND #4 – The rise of the seamless transaction

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Making the delivery quick and easy will be another growing focus of

pure online plays or bricks and clicks. Click & collect has shown to be

very popular and players such as Amazon, Google, eBay are already

testing and beginning to implement quick delivery services.

4.3 CLICK & COLLECT

4.4 EXPRESS DELIVERY

#2015marketing Marketing Lexicon

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Marketing lexicon (1/4)

ADVERTISING ATTRIBUTION

Or attribution modeling, identifies the key events on the

customer’s journey that influenced him in its final

decision. A value is then allocated to each events. These

events can be ads but many other “touchpoints” can

impact the customer’s decision: articles, social networks

content, e-mails, sponsored/natural links… Attribution is

therefore a global customer comprehension and a

strategic tool. Within digital marketing, attribution is

particularly important as it allows marketers to value the

specific contribution and return of each investment.

APPOINTMENT BOOKING

Online appointment booking (also called appointment

scheduling) tools are softwares offering a diary and

scheduling features and hosted on a website or an app.

They allow a much better customer experience (ability to

find easily real-time availabilities and to book 24/7 on all

kind of devices) and a better management for the

business (less time spent by the staff answering

appointment-related calls, lower no-show rates because

of reminders sent to the registered users).

Learn more about Solocal Group’s appointment booking /

scheduling software

BRANDED CONTENT

Branded content is an editorial content produced by a

company to promote its offer in a likeable way. It blurs

the lines between editorial and advertising content. This

form generally provides a stronger customer experience

and is adapted to social network communication .

CLICK & COLLECT

Click & collect is an online shopping facility enabling

customers to reserve or buy a product online and plan its

delivery to the point of sale of their choice where the

customer will come and collect it. Click & collect enhances

both the customer experience and the company’s

logistics optimization. It is also a strong lever to a website’s

sales performances. Click & collect is an increasingly

popular Web-to-store service and represents a significant

part of online sales.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Customer experience is the entirety of all feelings and

interactions that a customer has with a company, before,

during and after his purchase. Its direct result is obviously

the overall satisfaction of the customer toward the service.

For that reason, it is crucial to any company to

understand, analyze and manage its customers’

experiences.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY

The customer journey is the path that follows a

customer from touchpoint” to touchpoint, that’s to say the

succession of steps leading the customer to a final

decision (whether online or offline). All the contents and

events met by the customer will construct his experience.

That is why the customer journey is essential to any

business.

The typical customer journey is comprised of six stages:

• Discovery and consideration (through word of

mouth, content or advertising)

• Research and evaluation (both online and offline)

• Purchase (both online and offline)

• Fulfillment

• Product returns, exchanges or maintenance

• Customer feedback, which fuels the discovery and

research stages of the journey of another

CUSTOMER TOUCHPOINT

A touchpoint is any place or event where an interaction

between the customer and a company arises. It can take

many forms, online or offline, and occur at any time

during the customer journey. Common touchpoints are:

the website, an ad on any media, the store, a

salesperson…

More specifically, in marketing, knowing your touchpoints

allows you to manage the customer experience at every

step of the purchasing process and optimize satisfaction

and conversion ultimately.

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Marketing lexicon (2/4)

DATA: (data marketing).

Data is the set of all values either quantitative or

qualitative that could be exploited for marketing purpose.

Internet has facilitated the dissemination of an

exponential amount of data, and businesses quickly

realized the potential of this resource. This growing

awareness has spawned a number of disciplines: data

acquisition, data mining, data analysis… Data is

increasingly used in digital marketing to improve

relevancy and targeting.

DISPLAY ADVERTISING

Often referred to as banners , display advertising is a

major type of digital advertising that can include text,

logos, pictures, video or rich media.

Display advertising can be attributed to a 90’s company

called AT&T that launched the first banner on the web

magazine hotwired.com, now known as “WIRED”.

Display advertising main business models are CPM (cost

per thousand impression) and CPC (cost per click) but can

also be CPL (cost per lead) and CPA (cost per action). An

emerging business model relies in time-based offerings.

Learn more about Solocal Group’s display advertising

offering

EXPRESS DELIVERY

More and more, customers have growing expectations

concerning the delivery options of an online seller.

Delivery price, time or location (including lockers) have

become critical marketing issues. Express delivery is one

of the trends among the dynamic delivery solutions

emerging recently. It will concern the fastest delivery

option offered by a website. Google, eBay, Amazon, Asos

and other online retailers are launched into a pursuit of

the quickest delivery solution, increasingly same-day

delivery and down to one-hour delivery.

GAP (customer journey gaps)

By opposition to the “seamless experience” concept,

the customer journey gaps are all the flaws and

imperfections in the service that hurt the experience of a

customer. They generate dissatisfaction and could be

due to a lack in the company’s offer.

Learn more on this topic with the following blog post:

Bridging the gaps on Customer journey

MARKETING AUTOMATION

Marketing technique based on softwares and

webservices allowing to program campaigns

automatically. It often includes personalization features to

adapt to each individual. Marketing automation is

frequently used in direct marketing, social network

advertising, website workflows…

Trigger Marketing is a good example of automation

processes. A marketing lever (an emailing for example) is

automatically sent to the customer after he has realized a

certain action (purchasing, visiting the website…)

MOBILE-TO-STORE

Mobile-to-store is a consumer behavior belonging to the

web-to-store phenomena. It is any web-to-store actions

performed from a mobile device: display advertising,

push messages, search engine research, use of a store

locator, consulting a website or a map, appointment

booking…

Learn more about Solocal Group’s mobile-to-store

platform

MOBILE PAYMENT

Mobile payment or m-payment, are all the solutions

enabling to transfer money to a third party thanks to a

portable electronic device. They can be performed either

online or in-store. Existing m-payments are numerous:

text messages, money transfers through digital wallets,

contactless payments on smartphones, credit card

payments…

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Marketing lexicon (3/4)

NATIVE ADVERTISING

Is a form of online advertising that emphasizes a content

consistent with the organic (non paid) content of the web

page in which it is displayed. The aim is to display an ad

that will be less intrusive for the viewer and, thanks to it,

make it more efficient.

PERSONAL SHOPPING

Personal shopping is a tailor-made experience for

customers. The idea of such a service is to propose

personalized advices to each individual. A good example

of this technique is Oasis’ “My personal stylist” service

Learn more on this topic with the following blog post: How

to use personal shopping to drive footfall to your stores

and provide an exceptional customer experience

PERSONALIZATION

Personalization marketing lies in the fact of tailoring the

content of a website to the profile of a viewer (its known

characteristics and preferences). It is a form of data

marketing involving customer understanding and data

management. It is mainly used to enhance customer

services and conversion.

PHYGITAL

Contraction of “physical” and “digital”, the Phygital

concept defines the business initiatives aiming to rethink

the in-store experience by enriching the customer’s

experience thanks to digital devices, tools and data. Even

if the Phygital Marketing concept is still emerging, the

consumer’s in-store behavior has already substantially

changed with new connected devices. Thus, the

digitalization of the physical stores has already begun.

Discover phygital initiatives on Local Ideas

PRE-TARGETING

Pretargeting can be defined as pushing ads with

messages based on a customer higher propensity to

purchase a product/service, this being based on

behaviour data cross-analysis. Pretargeting is therefore

the opposite technique of retargeting, based on

anticipation instead of reaction.

PRODUCT LOCATOR

A product locator, in a very comparable manner to the

store locator, enables a consumer to know if a product is

available in a particular store. It is a great challenge for the

web-to-store process and answers to a major customer

concern which is to know where to find the product he is

looking for nearby.

RETARGETING

Retargeting is the process of submitting personalized

marketing levers (banners, e-mails, etc) to a customer

after its visit on the website of an advertiser. This

personalization is based on behavioral criteria. Broadly,

this process has been democratized by companies like

Criteo.

SEAMLESS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Talking about seamless customer experience is talking

about a goal to achieve a perfectly fluid customer

experience. Customers naturally expect a service

available at any time and on any device (ATAWAD) with

the most intuitive experience. Thus the “seamless

standard” encompasses all marketing solutions that can

facilitate a fluid customer journey: responsive design,

easy access to the needed information, easiness of use

of transactional tools/online payments, real-time

customer support…

Learn more on this topic with the following blog post:

Bridging the gaps on Customer journey

MULTISCREEN / MULTI-DEVICE

Applies to any information available on different types of

devices and the subsequent use: computers, tablets,

smartphones, game consoles, TV.

We often speak of a multi-screen advertising campaign:

the same campaign is disclosed on different channels to

maximize the audience. But these terms may apply to

any multiple-media customer experience. The trend of

'responsive' websites (compatible with PC, tablet,

smartphone) is also an illustration.

Because of the differences in the tracking methods

depending on the device, multiscreen use makes it

difficult for marketers to have a single view of the overall

behavior of a consumer.

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Marketing lexicon (4/4)

STORYTAILING

Contraction of “storytelling” and “retailing”, this concept

describes an underlying trend in large retailers’

marketing strategies. With the shift to multi-channel

communication and e-commerce, retailers have to

rethink their former model of marketing, supply chain

and footprints. Instead of communicating through

physical media, they tend to create their own content

and, sometimes, even their own media. Doing so, they

are able to include a storytelling in all the steps of their

customers’ journey.

TIME-BASED DISPLAY OFFERINGS

Display advertising are most commonly sold per

impression (CPM), click (CPC) or action (CPA). However,

time-based display offerings gather any pricing schemes

that relie on time spent on the ad’s page or on the

destination website after clicking on the ad.

WEB-TO-STORE

Web-to-store designates the phenomenon in which a

consumer gathers information online before visiting a

store. This consumer behavior is also referred to as ROPO

for “Research Online, Purchase Offline” or webrooming. It

represents a major challenge for marketers and the

interest for Web-to-store is even growing with the rise of

mobile. Some major triggers of the Web-to-store are store

locators, product locators, click & collect, online

appointment booking…

Learn more about Solocal Group’s web-to-store platform

TRACKING

Tracking is a dynamic analysis of the efficiency of a

company’s communication over customers. Tracking is

the process of observing the behavior and

responsiveness of prospects to understand how the

company’s marketing actions impact its business and

ultimately optimize conversion.

STORE LOCATOR

A store locator is an online service allowing the customer

to localize a point of sales and find all relevant information

and transactional functionalities he is looking for about

this point of sales.

Store locators are crucial tools to the web-to-store

process. They can be accessible either from the

company’s website or app. The impact of a store locator

on conversion can vary significantly depending on the

visibility (search engine optimization), engagement and

conversion tools (product locator, store promotions/news,

click&collect, calls-to-action).

Related words are store finder, branch locator, dealer

locator, stockist locator, branch finder, dealer finder,

stockist finder.

Learn more about Solocal Group’s store locator software

SHARING ECONOMY

Sharing economy can be defined as the set of all

business models fostering a collaborative consumption of

goods and services. There is no consensus over a

common definition of sharing economy and, therefore, it

is also referred to as peer economy or collaborative

economy. Nevertheless, the common point of all the

recent initiatives is the sharing of resources, either human

or physical. For a sharing economy business the network

size is the most critical factor as most of them rely on

communities. Some of the most popular collaborative

communities are certainly covering room-sharing

(Airbnb), product-creation (Quirky), car-sharing (BlaBlaCar,

Uber’s UberPop), e-learning…

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