15 Hal yang Anda perlu untuk marketing di tahun 2015

Planning next year's marketing mix is never easy, especially if you've allowed yourself to get a bit behind on the latest in technology, practices and trends. Use this list as a benchmark for where you need to ramp up and where you can deepen your dive for next year's marketing growth.​

This list is organized in two ways: 1) Marketing activity needed to drive results, and 2) Technology necessary to drive that activity. This way, you can easily see how marketing and technology must play a significant role together to help you tackle business strategy.

1. Big Data – Growing your understanding of data in 2015 is top of the list because nothing in your toolbox will tell you as much as you can learn about your audience than data. The technology here can be equally as simple by getting to know Microsoft Excel really well. The latest version comes packed with extras for digging into the data and making it present very well visually.
2. Landing pages – Flexibility in offering a new service, a competitive overview, or building out a page for a specific offer means you need the ability to create landing pages on the fly. You must create content that speaks exactly to the audience that needs your offer and landing pages help you do this. WordPress and Microsoft SharePoint come to mind as viable products to help you achieve this critical tactic.
3. Content library – Your company should have multiple content creators (anyone can write and contribute, and should be!) and then you need a place to store all of that content so others, particularly your sales team, can easily find and use your work. Get organized once and for all and make sure you're making it easy for everyone to leverage your content assets. Microsoft SharePoint offers this feature as well as many CRMs, like Salesforce.
4. Email – No, it's not dead. It's alive and well and still one of the main tools to reach your audience and track their engagement. If your current tool needs dusted off for 2015, consider finding one that will be so fun you want to use it every day, because you may just want to depending on your strategy. Lots of SaaS models make it easy and fun, like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
5. Analytics – It does pay off to go back and revisit your traffic, the goals you set for downloading content, the pages visited, etc. and it will take time to get this all built out if you're creating your program from scratch. It's worth it and you shouldn't simply rely on the straightforward Google analytics tool. Tailor it to your needs and send yourself reports frequently. Digital technology like this allows you to adjust the rest of your work as needed based on the numbers – take advantage of that flexibility and constantly improve your work over time. Most of the programs you use have analytics and insights tools, start there and perfect your processes.
6. Social – Decide what you want this channel to do for you this year; each can have different goals. For example, Facebook may be great for recruiting new talent while Twitter is best for driving website traffic. Decide how your channels fit, make a commitment to consistently posting and work this little gem into your overall plan for the best impact. For lead generation, make sure you're following and engaging, where it makes sense, of course, your partners, clients and prospects. Most of the technologies listed above pull in the contact's social links or allow you to push your content via a social channel. Use those efficiencies and teach your whole company to go social.
7. Webinars – First and foremost, take your 2014 webinars and turn them into an on-demand channel for lots of leveraging for 2015. Next, go to those insights or analytics and determine what topics held the most value, then decide how you can increase that value in 2015.  What blog post performed the best in 2014? Make that your first 2015 webinar. There's likely lots of good stuff here you can reuse for 2015. If you're sticking with the Microsoft suite, Lync is a good tool; otherwise Cisco, ReadyTalk and BrightTALK could be your go-to product.
8. Collaboration – Most of the marketing on this list could be created via collaboration with your partners, clients and inside teams. Don't allow your marketing to find itself in a silo next year – collaborate! Microsoft SharePoint, mentioned above, it a great tool for this as well as Yammer, Wrike, Basecamp – lots of options here.
9. Proposals & RFPs – In my many years of work I've yet to meet someone who said they love to sink their mind into a great proposal creation process. Not one! Technology can really help here, if nothing else to help you keep organized, automate a few steps in the process and build templates you can leverage for the next hairy RFP. Tinderbox and Proposable are potential options. Don't forget some of your other tools may have similar features you can leverage for this important sales support activity.
10. Presentations – Creating a presentation for your team to share with an audience, whether it's an audience of one or many, isn't likely your 2015 challenge. Figuring out how to leverage that deck for lead generation is likely your goal. More SaaS options come to mind here, like SlideShare, or leveraging your company profile on LinkedIn. Make it your goal to use, and then reuse, your small group presentations for the larger audience you want to reach.
11. Training – Making learning part of your culture should ultimately be your goal, but if that isn't going to happen, add in a healthy dose of training and sharing to your team's regular cadence. Using technology for delivering or creating this training is possible with platforms like Lessonly and Lynda. Most of the products you buy, like Microsoft's, also come with training opportunities to help you work smart.
12. Mobile – Don't let this word trip you up. What it really means is that you allow someone to connect with you wherever they are on the device they have. That's it. So when you're building out your super sweet campaign, think of how your audience may be clicking from their mobile device instead of their laptop. Translation: keep it simple. Extra technology not necessary unless you're ready to build an app.
13. Automation – This one can get the best of us. Before you're able to tackle any automation, your processes have to be spot on; otherwise, you'll automate a hairball (very not cool). Take the time now to walk through each step and validate the value each brings to your experience. Once you're there, tap into many of your above tools for fluid features, or, look at Oracle or Marketo if you think your current mix lacks what you need.
14. Video – What story can video tell for you in 2015? As a foundation, you need a video about your brand, your product, your client or case study, a demo and to round things out, a video about your culture. Remember, people still do business with other people and likability ranks high when it comes to that very important buying decision. Don't miss your opportunity. I'm very biased and basically rely on Adobe products for our team's video needs. 
15. Design – Don't skimp here. I've seen it all too often where a brilliant strategy completely fails because the design missed the mark. Design is important, worth the investment and can sway buying decisions (emotions!). The Adobe suite wins again here, but also services like Veer and finding a talented infographic designer can help tell your story and reach a deeper level of understand among your audience.
16. Podcasts - OK, I lied, there are 16 technologies you need to know and 15 just sounded better for a title. While flying under the marketing radar for the last few years, podcasts have been increasing in popularity partly due to breakthrough podcasts like Serial. You can upload your podcasts to SoundCloud or Podomatic (which lets you record your podcast directly to the site as well) if you don't have the resources to get on the iTunes store.