Part 5 of our 5-Part Series on the Top 10 Trends You Need to Know as a Marketing Professional
Trend #9 – The end of cookies as we know them
“The end could be near for cookies, the tiny pieces of code that marketers deploy on Web browsers to track people’s online movements, serve targeted advertising and amass valuable user profiles.”
Source: Wall Street Journal, October, 28 2013
We agree. We believe that a new unique identifier will come to the fore in 2014 to replace the outdated cookie. Cookies do a poor job at tracking people’s propensity to use multiple devices to access content. Also, cookies work poorly – if at all – on mobile devices. The new method will be designed to specifically address these problems.
Predictions:
Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft duke it out for the invention of a unique identifier that works as well as cookies.
With no clear winner, an open source group comes to the fore to develop a standard that merges the best thinking from these 4 companies and others into a unique identifier to replace the venerable cookie.
Trend #10 – SEO is Dead. Long Live Predictive Intelligence
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of affecting the visibility of your website or a particular web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. The traditional way to do this was to understand what terms a prospect or customer entered into Google and the other search engines to get to your site.
What killed SEO? Prism – the NSA’s clandestine data mining program. Google’s stated goal is to “do no evil”. So in response to Prism, the goliath in search made the strategic decision to encrypt 100% of search traffic sent through its servers. So where previously 60% of organic search results were accessible to marketers, now less than 2% of organic search results are accessible.
The second factor was something called Panda, an update to the Google algorithm that made poor quality content less important in determining how your site ranks in Google.
You can read about this on Forbes – in a controversial article entitled “The Death of SEO” dated in July, 2013.
What is replacing SEO? The art and science of reading digital body language exhibited by prospects at your website and also at the social media properties and mining that data for predictive value.
Predictions
Predictive intelligence becomes more important in reading digital body language (at your site) and also mining social media analytics.
So there you have it. 10 Trends We Predict Will Be Huge for 2014
- Content Marketing Gets Serious.
- Big Data becomes a Non-Issue.
- Responsive Design Becomes De Rigor.
- Increased Focus on Sales Enablement.
- New Forms of Lead Nurturing Pop Up.
- Customer Satisfaction Measurement Moves to the Marketing Department.
- CMO Dashboards Get Real.
- Personalization Gets Dicey.
- The End of Cookies as We Know Them.
- SEO is Dead. Long Live Predictive Intelligence.
