There’s precious little time left to finalize your plans for marketing in 2014, so let’s get our predictions in in time for you to act upon them.

What we have here are five trends in online marketing which will dominate in 2014. Some of have been coming for a few years, while others are extremely fresh. Figure out how many of these you can work into your company’s marketing plan this year.

1. Content Marketing – Ensuring your content is top-notch and that there’s a lot of it is your mission for 2014. If you’re marketing online, this is how you’re speaking with your prospects, so boring and smelly content won’t do! Besides that, studies are proving that companies having a blog regularly get 67 percent more leads than those who don’t.
2. Image based Content wins the day – It’s official now: nobody wants to read. At least, they like to look more! Visually-based content will remain the most shared, and acted upon. This means not only videos, but social media outlets like Pinterest, Instagram and Slideshare that can take advantage of the fact that 65 percent of us are visual learners.
3. Retargeting – A trend that is gaining interest fast, retargeting is the practice of having your ads follow customers around. I know; it may sound creepy, nevertheless it does miracles for your brand by keeping it in front of someone who has expressed a desire for that specific search phrase. AdRoll and Google are the top players at the moment, however, many more are joining the party.
4. Social Signals – While the jury is still out as to how much social signals work to your benefit in Google’s search engine algorithm, there’s little question that as we become a more social web, this significance will only rise. You should be following a social media marketing plan, and that it takes advantage of the major players like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram.
5. Micro-Targeting in Ads – Many of the ad platforms, particularly Facebook with its promoted posts and custom audiences, along with LinkedIn are helping marketers target incredibly niche audiences easily, and the results can be extremely good. 2014 will be the year this takes a firmer hold on the paid ad scene.