Monday 29 December 2014

The Most Important Mobile App Technology Trends for the year 2015

whatech.com
An upcoming year 2015 is all set to hit our calendars within a short time. The technology geeks, especially for the mobile app sector are looking forward to look the updates and changes in this particular industry. Considering the researches and study by technology predictors a mobile app is going to be in a trend. As per the current scenario, app development is at the initial stage and it will strike more in the upcoming year.
The most remarkable app technology trends are discussed here considering survey and analysis report from the authorized researchers.

Mobile Payment Systems
Majority smartphone users utilize the respective app store for their convenience. Thus, m-commerce is going to be strike in a market for the next year. Mobile payment systems are updated with the easy to access, secure and scalable functionalities. Digital wallets, mobile payment systems, money transfers, bank applications are the resources for the increased payment transaction.

Dedicated On-demand services apps
During the year 2014, there are many offline stores get active in the mobile app store with the exclusive products and services. The m-commerce apps are available in a great quantity. But, the rapid acceptance of on demand service apps is opening a window for the native app developers in 2015. The apps such as, on-demand taxi, in-home beauty services, house and office cleaning services are some of the examples to be considered.

Social Media App Payments
It is a pretty common in the China and Korea to pay for the products and services via social media apps. Almost all social apps are looking forward to acquire this functionality for the remaining countries as well. The Line has released a Line pay to facilitate users with in-app purchases and money transfer. The most popular social media apps are as well working upon the in-app payment features in the almost all mobile app platforms.

Cloud application
It is going to be the top most sizzling topic in a mobile technology industry. It is a hybrid platform for the both desktop and web application. It is predicated that during the year 2015, cloud applications are developed through the direct cloud platform. The technology is becoming popular because of the rich user friendly experience and quick response.

The Internet Of Things – Overhyped And Premature Or An Area Of Opportunity?

business2community.com
The Internet of Things (or IoT) is the talk of the tech community and brands, from Silicon Valley to Silicon Roundabout. Put simply, it’s about devices connecting and communicating relentlessly with each other. From fridges and washing machines to smoke alarms and TVs, you name it – it’s all getting connected and soon enough you too will be using smartphones, tablets and voice control features to communicate with your devices.

Why is it important?

According to Gartner, by 2020 there’ll be 26 billion connected devices globally, generating a projected $7.1 trillion in sales. It’s not easy to digest this figure and even less easy to get your head around the extent of data these devices will create and collate – huge volumes, holding valuable insight and innovation opportunities for firms.
Industry leaders such as Google and Apple are already ploughing ahead, creating partnerships with or acquiring new and disruptive firms who harness and manipulate this technology. For example, Google recently paid $3.2 billion for Nest Labs, a home automation company co-founded by the godfather of the iPod and iPhone. While Apple has introduced HomeKit, an IoT platform that will coordinate various third party home automation accessories, allowing you to communicate with your home via Siri.

Is it overhyped and premature?

Outstanding questions – such as how exactly will these devices communicate with one another if they are produced by different manufacturers, or how extensive programming might be if consumers need things changed – remain to be solved. These could hamper both the development and take up of such technology in the short-run. The longer-term view however is that the possibilities of this technology are starting to appear less outlandish. Indeed, it is widely believed that soon enough they will be used to effectively solve every day problems. But the new emerging question will be – do all consumers want that? There are signs that there is appetite for this type of technology. New research from App Annie shows that downloads of connected device apps have seen a 50% increase in the United States since last year, with growth in media, productivity, health and fitness, home and watch being particularly strong.

In-store cognitive apps will solve retail’s biggest challenge

mobilecommercedaily.com

Alex Sbardella is product strategy director at Red Ant
Alex Sbardella is product strategy director at Red Ant
By Alex Sbardella and Rodney Bryant
Have you ever been shopping in a retail store and known more about a product than the sales assistant?
More frequently, the response to that question is a frustrating yes. According to a Motorola Solutions Shopping Study, 54 percent of all retail store associates report that shoppers are better connected to product information than they are.
This is an issue that retailers have been struggling to overcome in the last few years as more consumers turn to the Internet and their smartphones to research products, reviews and make side-by-side comparisons before making a purchase.
However, with this approach, consumers are often only evaluating what is available to them through reviews and social sharing, overlooking critical data that any discerning consumer could miss.
Think thank
With the right tools, retailers could have the ability to connect the dots for customers and guide them through purchase decisions.
The answer to solve this industry-wide challenge can be found in “thinking applications” – mobile apps that harness intelligent, self-learning systems and use data-mining, analysis, pattern recognition and natural language processing to bring the power of Big Data to shop floors.

Rodney Bryant is a retail consultant for IBM Global Business Services
Rodney Bryant is a retail consultant for IBM Global Business Services
Thinking apps go beyond the structured consumer profile data of age, location and past purchase history found in databases. These new apps seek to understand and know customer needs by also using unstructured data found in social media, online reviews and other written documents.
It is less complicated than it sounds.
With the right tools in place, these intelligent apps can crunch data into a format that is easily actionable in seconds, giving employees the ability to become experts with every product offered.
With a push of a button, employees can understand more about their customer by analyzing demographics, purchase history and wish lists, as well as product information, local pricing, customer reviews and tech specs.
Make it personal
To date, mobile retail solutions have mainly focused on pushing customers personalized promotions. Thinking apps provide retailers new innovation possibilities to truly personalize the experience and drive sales.
The power of cognitive enables sales assistants to interact with customers more effectively, answer their questions quickly and help them along in the buying process by identifying the best options for a consumer’s specific needs.
Consider this holiday shopping season.
Many stores have hired new employees for the busy time of year. By leveraging apps that “think,” employers are able to quickly train and scale up worker expertise in a way that until now has never been possible.
AS ONLINE SHOPPING continues to grow, the power of cognitive computing and mobile has the ability to transform the in-store experience for shoppers during the holiday season and beyond.
While the use of thinking apps in retail is just starting to take off, in the coming years we predict many retailers will power their business with cognitive to better arm their employees with the tools they need to meet consumer demand.

Top 10 mobile advertising campaigns of 2014

Burger King tests self-serve rich media ads
Burger King
L’Oreal, Burger King and Nissan are among the brands leading the way so far this year in taking mobile advertising strategy to the next level through enhanced targeting, greater interactivity and native experiences. 

While mobile ad budgets continue to grow, too many campaigns are simply shrunken down versions of a desktop program. However, towards the middle of 2014, there was a flurry of activity from big brands pushing the enveloped on mobile creative and tactics.

A big focus in 2014 was on moving beyond location to leverage a range of data available about consumers for more targeted strategies. Additionally, brands added uniquely mobile interactive elements and crafted impactful native experiences.

Here are the top 10 mobile advertising campaigns of the first half of 2014, in alphabetical order.

In June, Burger King began testing a way to deliver mobile coupons to consumers inside a geofence using a self-serve ad platform.

The ads promote the chain’s breakfast menu and are appearing on premium mobile sites such as Pandora. The ad unit itself exists as an overlay on top of the site or app being browsed, meaning consumers are not redirected to another site when they click on an ad.

By creating, deploying and measuring geotargeted rich media mobile ads itself instead of working with multiple vendors, Burger King is setting the stage for both a bigger commitment to mobile advertising and a pivot away from traditional banner ads.

The test is being conducted at five locations using FunMobility’s Mobile Engagement Platform, which has built-in audience targeting capabilities. It entails consumers inside a one-mile geofence receiving a coupon that can be saved to their devices.

The ads are being deployed as part of an A/B test comparing their impact against  standard banner ads using comparable creative, offers and audience targeting.

The History Channel and on-demand media streamer Netflix were a few initial experimenters to try native experience ads that appeared on publishing Web sites and took over the user’s entire screen.

The ads initially showed some success, garnering an average view time of 57 seconds. Delivered in partnership by international media and marketing solutions company Gannett and New York-based SaaS analytics company Moat, these particular ads, appearing on USAToday.com, showed the brands’ reliance on native advertising.  

When the learnings from a campaign launched last year by JetBlue revealed significant differences between smartphone and tablet users, the brand fine-tuned the next leg of the ongoing effort this spring to provide a clear differentiation between smartphone and tablet ads.

JetBlue’s “Air on the Side of Humanity” campaign uses a combination of long-form video, messaging and geofencing to tout the airline’s positioning as making traveling more enjoyable. The campaign was deployed in the Boston, New York and southern Florida markets.

The Air on the Side of Humanity campaign was singled out by Mobile Marketer last year as it was the first brand example of leveraging a voice-activated mobile ad.


In the updated version, interstitial ads were delivered inside a geofence around public transit centers. On smartphones, the ads focused more on brand consideration and less on sales in deference to how smartphones are frequently used for travel research.

On tablets, the ads featured a rich media game as these users have longer periods of time to spend interacting with content. Additionally, tablet users on Hulu and CBS viewers saw long-form video from the brand..

Beauty marketer L’Oreal Paris recently incorporated GumGum’s photo recognition technology to pick up on the hair colors of consumers in photos and personalize ads for its Ombre hair color line based on a consumer’s own hair color.

The campaign is an example of how marketers are looking for ways to personalize content on mobile in order to make it relevant for users and, hopefully, more responsive.

The campaign, which is being delivered across desktop and mobile, takes advantage of GumGum’s technology to detect the hair color of people in photos among the editorial content of its partners, such as Parade and Hollywood.com. In turn, a corresponding ad will be delivered directly to the consumer. For example, if dark hair is detected, then the technology may deliver an ad for dark hair-coloring products. 

 An in-image “Slider” unit enables all of Ombre’s color products to be included when ads appear over photos unrelated to hair. Instead of a single product being shown, the Slider tool places a number of personalized products in front of consumers and they are able to slide through the list of products.

In a stark change from McDonald’s typical flashy mobile ads that pack multiple calls-to-action and graphics into interactive ad formats, this spring the chain ran a new native ad campaign touting the origins of its coffee drinks.

The mobile ads ran within the mobile sites of publishers including Time Inc.’s Real Simple and Hearst’s Elle. With the burger chain struggling with same-store sales declines, the native strategy is an example of how the brand is trying to appeal to important younger consumers on mobile.

Younger consumers are most likely to ignore banner ads, with is why McDonald’s and other brands are increasingly looking for how meaningful ways to insert sponsored content within the flow of the editorial or entertainment content these consumers are already engaging with.

Friday 26 December 2014

The Future of Social Media: 25 Experts Share Their 2015 Predictions

business2community.com
The Future of Social Media: 25 Experts Share Their 2015 Predictions image Social Media Predictions2015 900x600
Social Media has cemented its hold on businesses as more and more marketers indicate that they are placing a high value on it and are wanting to master social tactics that effectively engage their audience. The past year has seen an increase in Social Media Marketing through countless studies, practices, industry trends and even some major acquisitions in the space. However, the exciting possibilities are yet to come as Facebook and Twitter announce potential “buy” buttons that help drive an even more personalized experience to consumers. Trends such as paid amplification, content directed to new wearable tech, native advertising are just some of the examples of what’s to come in 2015.
With the wide variety of trends ready to launch in 2015, we decided to reach out to experts and get their predictions for Social Media in the upcoming year.

The Future of Social Media: How Will It Impact Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service?

1. Xavier Major, CEO of Popular Media Consulting, LLC – @xavier_major
Social media will change how we do business, marketing and sales with the continued improvement of socials ads and open graph searches like search.twitter.com. Facebook will learn more about their users for ad targeting. Social selling via native ads and open searches on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Linkedin will be the new trend as these platforms grow in 2015. Community management and customer service will move to social as it’s a cost effective way to handle questions, support issues and delight customers with high transparency.
2. Ty Swartz, CEO of Chief’s Touch Consulting – @ChiefsTouch 
Companies failing on social media will realize that social communication is a valid form of inbound marketing when they create content designed specifically to their customer personas. This along with targeted Facebook advertising will have previously unsuccessful small business social media communications seen and heard by qualified customers looking for companies offering personalized solutions.
3. Drew Larison, Social Media Marketing Director at Web Success Agency – @MrDrewLarison
Focus on mobile more than ever before. Every day social media apps are dominating the eyeballs of your customers. Make sure that you are on the platforms you need to be on and also make sure you are learning how to communicate well on those apps.
4. Reed Berglund, CEO of FullBottle – @FullBottlegroup
We are seeing early indications that rising social video platforms i.e. Vine are providing effective alternative to adwords and Facebook advertising. There are still attribution issues utilizing these platforms, but all the players involved (Twitter/Vine, Facebook/Instagram, WeChat, Line, KIK, and Snapchat) are working very hard to create infrastructure necessary for tracking attribution.
2015 will be the year of systems alignment across social video. This will enable small businesses to reduce their acquisition costs by leveraging influencer advertising at scale.
5. Jasmine Bina, CEO of J.B. Communications – @jbcomms
I think companies that are smart enough to find and reach their target audiences in niche social media sites will have big wins. It can feel like a risk to invest resources in a small, unproven social platform – but if your people are gathering there instead of Facebook or Twitter, then that’s where you need to be.
6. Andrew Herrault, Lead Strategist at Connective Insights – @ConnectiveSEO
Social media will become a larger focus for advertising investment, especially with the news that Facebook will now block free adverts. This will force businesses to focus energy on maintaining the ROI of social media, as opposed to merely observing the vanity metrics (reach, likes, etc). Vanity metrics are good, but ROI determines the viability of a sustainable marketing channel.
7. Kevin Deegan, CTO of ON.com – @ONisfun
As mobile continues to grow, it’s clear it is the future of social media. Young users crave social media that is more specific to their needs, and offers basic functions that are mobile-friendly, a need which niche apps readily meet. With need-specific apps growing in popularity over the last year, it’s obvious that 2015 will bring even more apps to quell even the quirkiest user desires.
8. Andrew Stephen, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at University of Pittsburgh Katz Graduate School of Business – @AndrewTStephen
In 2015 I expect to see marketers become more serious about measuring ROI from their social media activities. Facebook is introducing changes that will reduce post reach for brands unless marketers pay for higher reach. This will change how marketers assess the performance of their Facebook content, and that mentality will spill over into the other channels they use.
9. Andrew Schneider, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Online Amiga – @myonlineamiga
In 2015, social media is going to quickly become two connected, yet distinct, strategies. First, as platforms like Facebook adjust how overly promotional content is filtered, businesses will have to become more social on social media, engaging with fans instead of just speaking to them.
Secondly, the advertising platforms will become more competitive, with big and small businesses investing in at least test runs using the highly advanced targeting options. As usual, new platforms will emerge, but it will take a miracle for anything, new or old, to take over Facebook’s dominance.
10. Ashley Small, President and Founder of Medley, Inc – @AshleyRSmall
Social media continues to expand and change as the New Year approaches. One of the biggest changes to come is with Facebook. Facebook has confirmed that in January 2015, they will carefully view images and content coming from business pages, and if they feel they are not telling a story or engaging their audience and just posting “promotional” posts, than they will not be showing their posts as much as they have in the past. This means businesses have to have budgets for Facebook ads, this will help boost their post to receive a higher number of impressions.
In 2015, it’s all about paying to advertise on social media. With analytics to show you how your money is being spent, is up to the business to determine if paying for Facebook advertising will be worth it in the long run for their business plan.
11. Laurie Menekou, President of Conceptual Communications – @Lmenekou
BIGGER on the SEO scale. As Google + continues to be a major player in the social media world, I predict it will start to take over and be more important than Facebook. Our clients care about results driven social media strategies and increasing their SEO platform is key to that – we predict Google + becomes the new front runner.
12. Jacqueline Woerner, Social Media Manager at Emarsys – @Emarsys
2015 is the year that selling goes social – big time: with more sophisticated approaches to Scommerce and integrated social advertising that draws on multiple data sources, marketers step up their game in social selling and bringing social media ROI to the business. We’ve also seen a major push into anonymous apps and private messaging, a trend that will stick around and force brands to communicate with consumers on their terms.
13. Dave Vronay, CEO and Founder of Heard – @HeardTeam
There will be widespread consumer push-back on human data trafficking sites such that smart brands will demand that sites demonstrate “fair trade data” practices. In addition, consumers will move on from so-called anonymous sites to applications that offer real solutions for online privacy where the audience as a whole can be verified but none of the individual members can be identified. Marketers will have to incorporate this sort of thinking into their ad strategy.
The Future of Social Media: 25 Experts Share Their 2015 Predictions image SM Trends 2015 247x600
Image Source: Media Bistro
14. Ali Din, Marketing consultant & CMO at dinCloud – @dinCloud
Interest in social media is undeniable. However, businesses are now going to struggle with the time, effort, and costs of participating and figuring out how to link it to leads or revenue. As these questions come up, tools that help measure the sales cycle will continue to grow in demand. Social media experts need to expand into lead generation experts that understand a broader scope of the sales funnel.
15. Ashley Paris, Research Analyst at SiriusDecisions – @ashesVv
Organizations will invest in social network software/content management enhancements to host social communities/forums aligned to unique customer and prospect challenges extending further than marketing, sales or service. Insights from active social forums are too important to entrust to changing algorithms of Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Time and energy will shift away from spend discussions around “paid social” and “social advertising” and toward how to incubate a thriving proprietary social property, fostering interaction among communities of potential customers and advocates.
16. Andrew Caravella, VP of Marketing at Sprout Social – @andrewcaravella
Businesses will find ways to bring their brand’s social experience to all employees and better engage them as ambassadors, whether it’s a company of 200 or 20,000 team members. Beyond marketing teams with daily responsibilities, we will start to see activation efforts for smarter, stronger and more organized social engagement at the individual employee level.
17. John Ohara, SVP of Strategy at Giant Spoon – @johnmcklain
Brands will find richer territory in the next evolution of social content, fueled not only by mobile, but by a wider spectrum of connected devices and new media, triggered from even deeper consumer experiences. Think real-time wearable tech to track and work out with Lebron, virtually; a Snapchat aerial joyride transmitted from globally connected drones-all ways of broadcasting as a new content source. We need to expand our thinking and extend the canvas.
18. Lisa Parkin, President of Social Climber – @LisaMParkin
For some businesses, having social media accounts isn’t enough anymore. Many businesses are branching out and creating their own mobile app and increasing their mobile social media marketing. This is important, as 34 percent of cell internet users go online mostly using their phones, and not using some other device like a desktop or laptop computer. (Pew Research)
In 2015, social media will increase its steadily growing hold on mobile marketing, expanding businesses reach in that very active space.
19. Alfredo Ramos, General Manager of Pagemodo – @alfredoramosv
Social media will continue to be more closely integrated with day-to-day business practices. Many businesses will think social first when crafting a marketing plan or developing sales outreach strategies. In addition, businesses will continue to invest more of their marketing and strategy budgets toward existing and new social platforms, as well as social analytics. Specifically, as the organic reach of promotional content faces more challenges, paid placements will become essential in reaching potential customers via social media.
20. Seshu Madabushi, Founder & CEO of mKonnekt – @mKonnekt
In 2015 we predict action oriented improvements in the social media being a big factor – the likes of “Buy Now” in Twitter etc. Till date people are looking at the reach numbers in Facebook or retweets/favs in twitter – going forward whether there reach can be translated to sales figures. Last year we predicted the reach of videos and this year we will see the trend growing and that too Facebook videos
21. Kelsey Goeres, Social Media Associate at MyCorporation – @MyCorporation
With things like paid Facebook advertising becoming more prominent, social media will become more about earning revenue in 2015, as opposed to years passed when the main role of social outlets was to build brand awareness.
22. Erin Mulrooney, Digital Media Supervisor at ab+c Creative Intelligence – @erinmully
One of the biggest things to watch out for in social in 2015 is the rollout of Facebook’s advertising triforce. Start with Atlas, the Microsoft online ad measurement suite that Facebook purchased last year, combine it with LiveRail, a mobile video network purchased earlier this year, and add both to the massive audience platform Facebook maintains. With over 1 billion users, Facebook is setting themselves up to dominate with data, measurement and engaged ad delivery.
23. Hugo Pereira, Product & Digital Strategist at Talentsquare – @hugosbpereira
Social media will play a bigger influencing role in driving leads and customers. It’s becoming easier to analyze the ROI of sales that different social channels bring to both B2B and B2C businesses, therefore it’s highly predictable that businesses will invest more on broadcasting their influence and expertise in the field to drive more sales.
24. Rachel Miller, Chief Listener at Pipeliner CRM – rachelloumiller
2015 = Year of Transparency
No longer will companies be able to say one thing and do another. Engagement becomes crucial: right-time, not necessarily real-time; Aided by social media automation tools that identify new prospects then distribute curated content. Prioritizing engagement spurs changes in content creation. Businesses will no longer strive to push content out daily. Instead, they will focus on longer form content (stats show effectiveness here) that provides context, hard data and analysis.
25. Satya Krishnaswamy, Founder & CEO of NextPrinciples – @satyakri
With the introduction of the ‘buy’ button both on Twitter & Facebook, social commerce will truly get its wings. To ensure the most targeted offer on social for customers based on demographic & behavioral attributes, vendors will build cross channel consumer profiles. Customers will benefit with more relevant offers and companies will benefit with a more comprehensive customer profile across social and traditional channels.

Pitfalls in Internet of Things for 2015 & Beyond

eetimes.com
PARIS — Ever since Cisco started to issue whopping predictions -- like "50 billion IoT devices by 2020" -- the electronics industry has danced to the music. Companies have rushed to the market, developing and acquiring technologies that they think will help them call the IoT tune. In 2014 many IoT discussions broke out, industry consortia popped up, and new products rolled out, many of them actually getting connected to the Internet.
“On a high level, 2014 was a year when we’ve begun feeling the universe [of Internet of Things] will happen,” says Reza Kazerounian, Atmel’s senior vice president and general manager of the microcontroller business unit, in a recent interview with EE Times. With everyone paying so much attention to IoT and getting involved in discussions around IoT, “we started to feel that IoT need to come together and it will eventually take off.”
In fact, “50 billion IoT devices by 2020” is beginning to look not as crazy as it seemed at first. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley, in its report, defined IoT as “the next big computing cycle, after Mobile Internet,” legitimizing IoT not as hype, but as the next computing paradigm everyone should be in.
But wait. Is this all too good to be true?
The IoT bubble could still burst, if not in 2015, then in the next several years. EE Times in recent weeks talked to several companies and analysts. We asked what they see as the biggest IoT hurdles in the coming year.
Skip Ashton, vice president of software at Silicon Labs, pointed out that it's time for the industry to start talking about IoT not by dwelling on the "Internet," but instead on the "Things."
Ashton explained that knowing intimately what "things" are supposed to do and how they think and behave will be the key to solving one of the IoT's most pressing issues: application layers. Beyond IoT's applications layers, there are unsolved issues that range from privacy, to sensor fusion, to security.
Some companies are treating those issues as opportunities, while others tread carefully. In the following pages, we discuss potential pitfalls in IoT in 2015 and beyond, identified by those working in the IoT industry.

10 Unbreakable Rules for Content Marketing in 2015

business2community.com
10 Unbreakable Rules for Content Marketing in 2015 image Zz0xZTBlNGE5YWE1ZmJmY2NjOTM4MzZjMjcyNWY2MGVkYg 900x399
2015 is going to be another awesome year for content marketing. With 86% of B2C and 91% of B2B marketers using content marketing, we expect these numbers to grow and grow. As more of you marketers come into the content fold, we’ve got the 10 unbreakable rules for doing it right in 2015.
Ready to be awesome?
1. Listen to your audience.
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via electronicproducts.com
Whether you’re doing it through social media analytics or blog comments-section reading or a good old-fashioned focus group, lean in until you can hear what the people want. You exist for them, and not the other way around.
2. Be real with yourself about what your audience wants.
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You might have the coolest idea in the world, but if your audience doesn’t respond to it with the page views, shares, or comments you need, be ready to switch it up with a cool idea that’s more in line with what they want and what else is working. It’s what good content marketers do.
3. Don’t try to be all things to all people. 
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Your content and your content buckets should be focused enough to appeal to the audience you want to reach, while being broad enough to appeal to a few subsets within that audience. Don’t cast the net too wide — it’ll dilute your message and potentially confuse people.
4. Follow the rule of thirds.
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To get the right amounts of content types to your audience, remember to follow the rule of thirds: one third of your content should be original, one third should be licensed, and one third should be user-generated or influencer based. This is the best place to start when figuring out what mix is right for you. You can adjust your recipe as you go.
5. Don’t get lazy with your visual content.
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Crappy stock photos aren’t going to cut it with consumers anymore (did they ever?): authenticity is the name of the visual game from here on out. If you’re not spending time deciding what visual content is going to pair up with your carefully written text, you’re losing huge opportunities to win your audience, who process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.
6. Get thee to a CMS!
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If you’re not using one already, this should be a priority. If you are using one, take some time out to assess if it’s still working for you, or what you might be missing out on. Finding the right software and platforms is the key to staying organized, which is the key to making sure you are scaling your content.
7. Have an authentic voice. 
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Whatever tone of voice you settle on, make sure it’s consistent, relevant, and real. If the hills aren’t alive with the sound of your particular content marketing music, make it a goal for 2015 to get there by creating a reliable tone of voice and upping your unique factor.
8. Don’t avoid technology and tools. Let them help you.
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This one is for those out there who might be holding on to ideas about writing or marketing pre-internet. There are some awesome content marketing tools (our Content Marketing Cloud being one of them) that can seriously help you publish and keep track of your content — and even predict how consumers will use it. This will only make the creative processes smoother, we promise. Technology is your friend.
9. Embrace numbers, data, and analytics.
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Just as you should embrace scheduling tools and a CMS, you should also embrace the numbers they can get you and make smart changes based on what you find. Social analytics can help you AB test types of content and headlines to make sure they aligne with your KPIs. Traffic numbers can tell you when the best times to publish are. Get on it.
10. Be brave. 
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Content marketing is exciting because there are so many creative ways to do it. Push the boundaries. Get futuristic. Make a sweet app. Mix it up, content marketers: the sky isn’t even the limit (have you seen this cool space jump by Red Bull?). We can’t wait to see what you come up with in 2015…and beyond.