As we round out the first month of the New Year, we continue our look into this year’s hottest trends and best practices.

Here’s a look at some of the predictions from each of the modern marketing’s practice areas:

Video
According to a recent article from ChiefMarketer,YouTube is the second most searched search engine. Why? Video is powerful. It’s emotional. It moves us. It makes us laugh, cry and sing. The modern marketer who perfects the use of video in their marketing mix will find great success in 2014.

Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) recently launched a redesign of its company website. The updated site relied heavily on a video format which features testimonials and interviews with partners and clients. The use of video gives the site a fresh and modern feel, while being able to convey the level of expertise the company has achieved and its clients have benefited from.

Targeting
In the coming year, technology will allow the purchasing process to seamlessly transition from online to offline and allow marketers to target prospects based on their purchasing behavior. Watch out for vendors such as I-Behaviour and Exponential.

According to a MarketingWeek article, “micro-targeting and micro-messaging are also set to be buzzwords in 2014. These are forms of targeting which take advantage of a multitude of datasets beyond demographic, combining these with consumer attitudes and behaviours to target like-minded people motivated by similar things. This could vastly improve efficiencies in display advertising, and 2014 is likely to see progress in this area, though mass adoption is some way off.”

SEO
According to Google, the company makes about two updates to their algorithm per day. In the past year, the company has taken an aggressive approach to reduce the amount of spam and manipulation of the algorithm.

These updates may seem daunting, but they actually level the playing field and give web marketers the opportunity to step in and make their sites more competitive in the context of Google’s new rules. Google’s desire, of course, is to give search engine users great results, not the results that contain the highest level of spammy link profiles.

The best way to ensure a strong SEO strategy if for marketers to focus on cleaning up their links and key words and should aim their efforts at creating compelling and textually rich content that includes images, video, and audio, and that fully explores what attracts new customers and keeps them coming back.

Social Media
Social media will continue to be a significant element of a successful modern marketing strategy. According to Marija Hamed of Happy Marketing Club, statistics from your social media marketing efforts will continue to offer valuable insight in determining how, when, and where, marketers reach their social media audiences. Be sure to check out her short video below for more of her predictions regarding social media marketing in 2014: