Guest post written by
Erika Trautman

CEO of Rapt Media

The online video industry moves quickly. As the year comes to an end, we’re already contemplating what’s in store for online video in 2015. For marketers and publishers alike, the new year creates a tremendous opportunity to shake off the shackles of everyday execution, start thinking big for 2015, and determine how to deliver a new level of sophistication, user engagement, and results.

From mobile video to marketing automation to digital-first programming, here’s how we see today’s emerging trends growing into marketing must-haves in 2015.

1. Mobile will matter more than ever

Today, over 20% of video views are happening on mobile devices, and that trend is growing quickly. According to a recent eMarketer study, more than 77% of all tablet users will watch video programming on their devices at least monthly, and that penetration rate will grow to 87% by 2018, totaling 149 million tablet video viewers. To put that into context, more than 70% of all digital video viewers will be watching on a tablet in 2018.

Rewind three years, and know that 2015 is going to be a great year to put fantastic mobile-centric, and mobile-inclusive innovative Web ideas in front of your brands, as well as run targeted mobile ads, and collect and analyze user interactions from all types of mobile devices.

2. Marketing automation will make videos smarter

Fifty-eight percent of top-performing companies (defined as those where marketing contributes more than half of the sales pipeline) have adopted marketing automation, and a greater amount of agencies will become fluent in the marketing automation world in the coming year as the adoption of marketing automation technology is expected to increase by 50% by 2015, according to SiriusDecisions.

But businesses will take marketing automation a step further this year by integrating their marketing automation systems (MAS) with their video content. The metrics and results that agencies will present to brands from their MAS-integrated videos will forever change the depth of analytics and customer information that brands expect from their videos. Gathering and sorting lead and engagement data to qualify leads, drive sales, and to understand the difference between mass viewers and target audience viewers is finally possible (and easy to collect) via marketing automation-integrated video.