Getting prepared for your online marketing plans in 2014? As the technology continues to evolve, there are some key ways you can ensure your marketing is future proofed for the new year. 

Focus on Marketing that is Measurable

Given the state of online marketing, there's no reason why your marketing shouldn't be measurable in 2014. Every online interaction should be tracked and analyzed for effectiveness. If you really want to be advanced, work on tracking them together in a campaign. Understanding how social media traffic affects your campaigns versus emails can be very powerful. 

This future-proofs your marketing in a few different ways. Having a system where you can easily swap in new technologies and measure their effectiveness means that you can quickly figure out which trends actually deserve your attention. Plus it ensures that you have a history of metrics so that you can compare your marketing from year to year and compare it to sales. Expect there to be better ways to credit marketing activities with revenue generation as well.  

Focus on Marketing that is Meaningful

Many people are intent on getting lots of people to their website, but ask them what they're supposed to do once they're there, and the answers get hazy. Ranking well for important terms can great for your business, but if too many people don't find what they're looking for once they're on your site, you can bet you'll start to sink. 

The same can be said of social media. If your company has fans or followers, but no idea where they fit into things, it might be worth examining how social media fits into your overall marketing strategy. 

Ultimately, you want your marketing to provide value to your customers. Given the amount of information available on every topic, if you just endlessly pitch your own services, you can expect people to move on quickly to someone who actually says something useful. 

This can feel counterintuitive at first, but try to empathize with your potential customers. Think about what would cause them to start searching for your product. Understand their motivations, and think about what you would want to find in their situation. 

Instead of focusing immediately on getting them to purchase something, take the long view that if you can impress people with your helpfulness, and become someone that they trust, you can end up having a much longer customer relationship with them. 

Focus on Developing Marketing Assets

Oftentimes when people pay for advertising or trade shows, they fail to realize they're paying for access. Instead of creating something interesting that pulls people in automatically, and creating your own customer relationships, you're focused instead on paying for access to people who might be interested. You're interrupting people, either in their day-to-day lives through advertising, or by setting up somewhere that will hopefully get a lot of foot traffic at a trade show. 

Imagine how much more beneficial it would be to instead focus your resources on building up marketing assets. And not just the paper kind. Consider focusing on building up actual marketing assets that continue to bring people in even after you've stopped creating them, like a blog. Companies with successful blogs can focus on creating great content that's actually helpful for people when they're looking at you, and can create your own relationship with customers.

Instead of using someone else's tollroads to get to your prospects, you can effectively build your own roads directly to them. By creating great content and using that to pull people into your website, you gain permission to market to them. 

You might be reading that and think that it only works for people who started blogging several years ago. The reality is that creating your own content will continue to be an important marketing strategy for the foreseeable future. As social networks are used more for purchasing decisions, people will share information on your product with each other. As people do more research on products before making a purchase, they'll be looking for more and more content to help them understand whether you have what they need or not. 

Marketing in 2014 will continue to be about having useful information that people can actually use. Not that marketing hasn't always been about that. It's just becoming more and more important for people to focus on creating marketing that's actually helpful. You can work forever on some clever tagline, but if your competitor gains the trust of your customers, it won't matter. Focus instead on great marketing that creates value for your customers, and try to gain permission to market to them more.

Looking to get started with a serious content strategy in 2014? Download our ebook on B2B blogging to see how you can get started: