You’ve heard me say that the online marketing industry is saturated. There are a lot of hacks & charlatans who know the right buzzwords to say & promises to make to get your business, but that’s not what I mean this time when I say online marketing itself is saturated. There are still some die-hard marketers who spend their Friday nights making sure they know every new development on every platform (and they’re the ones who will push your business further than you dreamed) – that’s not the problem. The problem is that your customers are expecting you. Technological developments always draw a line in the sand to separate the fauxs from the pros, and with consumers now expecting all the new tactics you devised in 2014, it’s time for innovation. For those marketers and marketing companies who use outdated checklists of obsolete tasks as your form of client service, you have my condolences – and I remind you that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results was Einstein’s definition of insanity. Everyone, pretty much, still agrees with that.

• You don’t have to change everything all at once; in fact, for testing purposes, its best you don’t. Anytime you try something new you want to be able to measure how well it worked, no? So what will you do differently? Change one thing that really matters to your brand and be prepared to get out of your comfort zone – your business depends on it.
• What aspect of your business really needs changing and why? Is it holding back other aspects of your marketing strategy or operations?
• Define what you’ve been doing in this aspect. Basic Facebook posts? Blogs? Email marketing? Giveaway campaigns? Separate what’s failed to produce results from what has, if anything.
• Now get far enough out of your comfort zone to understand a few of the changes that recently changed the game, choose one, and run with it.

Be excited about it – these changes are very cool. They could give you first-mover advantage over your competition if you give it a shot, and you don’t have a lot to lose considering you’re making a change in an area that wasn’t living up to your expectations to begin with. So what are the coolest changes as of late in the digital world?

Call it optic character recognition, extracted image text or a long list of technical terms for artificial intelligence, but it boils down to the face that Google and other platforms can now “see” your images[1] much the way we do. Images are no longer recognized only for the SEO we assign to them, they’re actually read for what they are. This is revolutionary for SEO, content marketing and even display advertising. One very simple example is this picture of a police car; Google can see from shapes and countless identification points that it’s a car, and the new ability to extract text specifies that it’s a police car.

Facebook is making sure it stays in the ring with an endless rollout of new features. I’ve equated Facebook to a search engine of its own since Graph Search came out (which is sadly still a mystery to many social media managers), but you may have noticed recently that the entire interface has been changed to something that resembles Google’s. A list of results can be categorized into posts, people, pages, even web… that’s powerful potential for any business. A local business comes up in results in every way possible – a searcher can view status posts from customers who were recently at your business and directly to your page itself, or any articles you’ve been featured in. It’s also rolling out a new format for the video sections of pages that looks like YouTube’s “channels.” After a 50% increase in video views[2] (from May – July 2014) just by introducing auto-play videos, it just might work to make Facebook an even more common source for people to get their news and brand info – if you lead them there.

Plus, Facebook’s ad platform now offers a network of websites for display ads just like the big search engines…

Campaigns need to be different. They need to be on different channels, and they need to be a bigger win for you than they are for the participating consumer. The consumers want to see new types of value in order to participate! There are traffic sources you’ve never heard of; and while they don’t cost much if anything, remember that what you invest in your marketer/marketing is a direct reflection of how much confidence you have in your brand. These new tools don’t require rocket scientists to execute effectively, but they won’t be done well by your nephew who recently got a marketing degree (no offense; I wish him all the best). A great monk once said “Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement.” In fact, if you’re not sure where to start your New Year’s Innovation or how to take it where it needs to go, infusing some new blood into your marketing team may be the best new decision you can make.

[1] http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/5909/did-google-read-text-image-can-affect-my-rankings

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/24/facebook-videos