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Digital marketing trends 2013 Trends in marketing to give commercial growth

Throughout the year I’m asked about What’s New, What’s Hot and What’s Next. This is one of the reasons why we’ve created the [What’s New in Marketing" updates, to give a monthly summary to help people working in marketing and using digital technologies see the latest developments which really matter. So much of what’s discussed daily in digital marketing is useful or interesting, but just noise.

In this review I will focus on the major trends which we think will be significant in 2013. What’s "significant’? These are marketing activities where we expect to see the most increased investment and focus in 2013. The activities will gain the funding since they will have the biggest impact in creating additional leads and sales and strengthening brands. It doesn’t focus on the latest new Ecommerce technologies and marketing techniques, I will create an additional post on this.

Poll - what do you rate as the most important digital marketing trends in 2013

In this review I have picked out what I see as the major trends in marketing activties and I’m interested to see how they compare to how you see it in your business or for your clients. In the poll, please select the most important trend based on that which you think will make the biggest commercial difference to leads or sales in your company, or a typical client if you are an agency or a client. Thank you!

Select ONE area of marketing which you believe will give you the biggest commercial benefits in 2013

Big Data Branded community engagement Content marketing Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) Contextual targeting through ad networks Marketing automation (triggered email) Mobile marketing Search personalisation (SEO)

The trends areas are listed in the poll in alphabetical order, with my list later in this post in order of how I see popularity. It will be interesting to see how they compare. I have put my eight trends in order of current interest in marketing based on marketers I’ve spoken to while at conferences, workshops or when consulting. I have spoken at three mobile marketing conferences in the Autumn, so that skews it a bit, but does indicate the interest.

1. Mobile marketing

The importance of mobile marketing varies dramatically by sector. It’s incredibly important to sales in some consumer markets where there is a sweet spot of mobile use to sales. In other types of business, the proportions of tablet and smartphone access are lower, less than 10% in some cases, but they’re heading in one direction.

The examples from this presentation show the impact mobile commerce is having already: + Betfair + Autoglass

Hub page: Mobile marketing

2. Content marketing

We rate a focus on content marketing as more important to marketing success today than social media since successful content creation and amplification supports leads and sales generation and engages existing customers across a wider range of digital channels than social networks. Content marketing supports SEO, Pay-per-click, landing pages and conversion rate optimisation, social media marketing and social media marketing.

Hub page: Content marketing strategy

3. Branded community engagement

Interacting with customers and prospects via social networks has the benefit of increasing promotion and awareness about brand through sharing and it gives an alternative to email marketing to broadcast promotions and content to customers that don’t favour email marketing. However, social networks have many limitations compared to communities developed on a brand site including the need to use paid advertising (Facebook EdgeRank), limited direct sales from social networks, limited options for creating tailored experiences, limited data capture and personalisation at an individual level). So we expect to see more medium and large companies growing branded communities on their own site alongside their social presence.

Here are some example from across different sectors.

MacDonalds Q&A Eloqua ASOS

Hub page:

4. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

We have featured many articles on [CRO processes[() and [CRO examples] in the past year. We believe it often doesn’t get sufficient budget compared to driving traffic to sites. CRO isn’t only important for Ecommerce and transactional sites. Every site should have conversion paths to marketing outcomes which contribute to the business.

Hub page: [Conversion rate optimisation](Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

5. Increased use of marketing automation

We have given several examples of the power of targeted email sequences during 2012. Once the preserve of larger companies. While not new and possible for many years, we are seeing more triggered emails such as welcome sequences. Increased adoption is made possible through low-cost email systems like Aweber, MailChimp and Office Autopilot.

Hub page: Marketing automation, Behavioural Email marketing

6. A move from #bigdata to #smalldata



As Alan Mitchell explained in our briefing on big data, in many organisations…

"Big Data is actually customer data: data about customer behaviour. This is something that organisations collect about their customers in order to do something like offer them a product or send them a message. It’s all about helping organisations do more, more efficiently.

This is the Big Blindspot of organisation-centric thinking. It naturally assumes that all future improvement will come from helping the organisation do things better when, in fact, the biggest opportunities might lie elsewhere completely – in helping people as individuals to do things better via new types of person-centric service.

Helping people do things better locates the epicentre of new value creation outside the boundaries, and control, of the current organisational set-up. For many organisations (including those that are excited about Big Data) this doesn’t (yet) compute".

We think there are bigger gains in “small data” which are using customer data and digital analytics to refine marketing through approaches such as conversion rate optimisation and email marketing.

7. Contextual targeting through ad networks

2012 has seen more use of the relatively new Adwords Remarketing technique and we can expect to see this increase in 2013.

Other networks.

Hub page: Behavioural ad targeting

8. Search personalisation

Google has always been about increasing relevance; it’s based its success on this. Over the last several years, Google has been increasing its ability to tailor results for the individual. This favours brands with the biggest engagement, particularly with the growth of Google+

Hub page: Search Engine Optimisation

I hope you find this look at the major trends in marketing useful as a prompt for what to include in your digital strategy and roadmap for new developments. I will follow-up with a more detailed post looking at innovation across the other areas of RACE Ecommerce trends across

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