2015 Search Marketing Predictions from John Gagnon

With digital marketers across the board hoping to catch a glimpse at the mysteries of the coming year, Acquisio’s ebook, The Future of Digital Marketing: 15 Expert Predictions for 2015, is selling like hotcakes – only it’s free, so it’s not really selling at all.

We’d say it’s flying off the shelves, but since it’s digital there are no shelves to fly off…

Let’s just say it’s a good read. If you don’t believe us here’s a sneak peak from expert and Acquisio partner, John Gagnon from Bing.

John Gagnon John’s Predictions: Make Room for Voice Control, More Mobile and Retargeting

Changes for Consumers

On the consumer side, one of the biggest trends will be taking search to where the searchers are. Search is changing from mostly browser based and text based results to other responses and interactions – think Siri, Google Now and Cortana.  

Traditional search will remain important, but other ways to interact with search results, including personal assistants and voice, will grow in 2015.

When you interface with Cortana or Google Now most cases you want the one right answer, think about what you expect for searches like “what is the capital city of China.”

Changes for Advertisers

Mobile

Mobile search has already exploded. At Bing Ads we’re already seeing more than 30% of all searches are from mobile, and that’s expected to grow. What’s interesting for marketers is that many of us are unprepared to capitalize on mobile conversions, namely phone calls.  

By the end of 2018 there will be 73 billion phone calls generated from mobile search alone, and calls from search are growing by 42% a year.

We optimize landing pages and optimize for clicks but one of the biggest conversion types for local businesses and B2B is the call itself. It’s not just about driving a call (we’re getting better at that and we will continue to see the engines move towards call extensions and call forwarding), it’s about optimizing who the call goes to and what happens on the call.

We aren’t doing as much as we can to optimize what’s happening on the call in order to get better close rates, increased order sizes and all that good stuff.  That’s where many marketers need to improve in 2015.

Retargeting

Another coming trend is about retargeting.

Right now if you look at search it’s historically been based on keywords. Now we’re starting to add a layer of persona targeting.  In the case of search, personas are built based on how a person interacted with a website (did they watch a certain video, abandon their card, or are they an existing customer.)

With retargeting we are able to build a bigger pool of people based on site activity. Persona targeting allows advertisers to look at what makes the person special in real life, thanks to social media data, and relate that information to both how they acted on the webpage and what keywords they used.  

Advertisers can use the combination of driving search with keywords and this element of retargeting to build really powerful campaigns that drive great ROI in 2015.  

For more expert predictions, download the full ebook here

2015 digital marketing predictions ebook

Jillian Zacchia

Jillian Zacchia

Jill is a professional writer, editor and social media procrastinator. With a degree in Literature and Communications from McGill, she started her journalism career writing about lifestyle and entertainment for teen magazines, and after dabbling with wedding and travel writing she began the transition towards content creation for start ups, marketing and tech companies.

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