1. 5 KEY TRENDS TO MAKE OR BREAK YOUR CORPORATE WEBSITE IN 2014Your corporate websites success is going to be affected by some major marketing and business shifts that are taking place. Weve put together a list of what we believe is going to have a huge effect on your website marketing strategy in 2014. Enjoy!

2. 1Community-engagement-advocacy transitionThroughout 2011 and 2012, companies were focused on growing their communities. Marketing executives utilized different tactics such as Facebook fans acquisition among others. In 2013 we started seeing change, where the focus started to shift to community engagement in a meaningful way. In 2014, this trend grows even stronger, as companies will look for new cost-effective and long-term strategies to enhance engagement with their customers and prospects. This strategy, if executed in a way that brings real value, will turn customers and prospects into advocates, which will have a significant business impact. Bottom line: If you have a business community or a customer base, it is time to invest in engagement tools and strategies to integrate into your major marketing vehicles. Implement, measure, and optimize.2Digital content creation and optimization is more important than everLong gone are the days where it was enough to be found on Google to help you reach your customers. Today, the name of the game is a holistic view of all your digital content assets, optimized constantly for better results. Your prospects and customers should not only be able to easily find you, but also to get to the information or the interaction they are looking for, easily and effortlessly. For this to happen, you need to be able to gauge what they are looking for. Bottom line: In 2014, invest in measurement and analytics that give you insights into what your customers look for, what they like, and dislike. Based on your findings, optimize content and offering across your digital channels. 3. 3Customer-centric organizations: More than buzzwordsIn 2013, theres been lots of buzz around what it means to become what Salesforce coined as a customer company. This is not about CRM at all. What this means is commitment to customer success from the get go, across all lines of businesses, through all channels, with the right policies and processes to support it. In 2014, we are going to see how companies move from theory to practice by becoming customer-centric organizations. Most of them will start by mapping their customer journeys, realizing which touch-points are the lowest hanging fruits. The corporate website a major customer touch-point will be one of the first to be affected. More websites will become customer-centric, which will be manifested in different ways - from meaningful engagement to more effective customer service. Bottom line: The corporate website is going to become an even more important marketing tool as its role in the customer journey is becoming more important. 2014 will be the year where the website will evolve to become the hub of the customer-centric organization.4Engagement as a leading KPIThe old way of evaluating if your digital marketing strategy works were metrics such as traffic and return visits. More and more companies are expanding these simple metrics and placing a newly concentrated focus on providing and measuring customer engagement on a deeper level, which results in retention and revenue growth. The basic engagement measurements are bounce rates and time spent on your website. But if you really want to make an impact with engagement KPIs, measure user interactions such as clicks within your website, social shares, and following call-to- 4. actions. Another user interaction that is under-utilized from a KPI perspective is site search metrics search engagement level, users specific areas of interests and correlation to the organizations business goals. Bottom line: In 2014, customer engagement KPI is going to become an even stronger parameter in evaluating marketing ROI. The enterprise market is already there, and the rest is going to follow. Make sure you are not left behind!.5Marketing ROI: The pressure is onWe saved the best for last. You, the marketer, is under heat. Theres never been more pressure to show marketing ROI. A smart marketer is constantly evaluating results and optimizing the marketing mix. An even smarter marketer is constantly looking for marketing tactics that affect bottom line, and is ready to show metrics and analysis to support marketing initiatives and budget spend.Bottom line: Its not going to get any easier. With more marketing tools available in the toolbox, there are also bigger expectations and demands. Pick wisely focus on the tools that have built-in analytics and report that tie to your business goals.ABOUT SphereUp is an innovative site search company providing active site search to service-driven organization. SphereUp Smart Search boosts conversion, increases website engagement, helps organizations promote content and control web traffic flow, and improves customer satisfaction. For more information, visit www.sphereup.com