If you are in the marketing profession, I think you’ll agree that our profession is experiencing some major disruption.
The traditional marketing theory and methods I learned at Kellogg Graduate School of Management back in the mid-90’s are still very valid. Half the battle is still doing the all important work of market segmentation, targeting, and positioning. I still refer to my 7th edition of Phil Kotler’s textbook Marketing Management from time to time (although that book is now in it’s 12th edition!)
However, back in 1995, we had no clue just how much the Internet would impact marketing over the next 15 years. And the impact has been very significant. The Internet has turned into a game changer for marketing.
Leading edge marketing professionals understand that they need to learn how to leverage all the new digital marketing capabilities. It is a great opportunity to build brand value, increase revenues, and cut down on marketing expenses.
So with that in mind, lets take a look at the top trends in online / digital marketing for 2011.
- Marketing Budgets Will Continue to Shift Towards Online. Customers and prospects are increasingly going online early in the buying cycle to gather information, form relationships, and make decisions about how they will buy. As a result, marketing leaders must move marketing mix budgets to mirror where the customers and prospects are - online. Online channels can reach a very targeted audience, are lower cost, and are becoming more measurable. As a result we should expect the continued decline in the use of traditional media. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about new marketing channels, professions, and processes as well as a decline in overall advertising budgets. Traditional agencies and publishers must transform their businesses to include digital marketing capabilities.
- Social Media Marketing Is Maturing. Those in the marketing profession can sense that we are in the middle of an important transition to the use of social media for marketing purposes. While the past few years many marketers have been experimenting with social media tactics, in 2011, leading marketing teams will be executing social tactics that are fully integrated into the overall marketing strategy. An overall social media marketing process will emerge that has firms following a never ending cycle of 1)Research, 2) Plan, 3) Engage and 4) Measure. Simultaneously, a new set of marketing capabilities are emerging, including Social Listening Research, Influencer Marketing, Community Marketing, and Social Gaming. These new capabilities will require new marketing marketing professional Career Paths and Education tailored to the new social media marketing realities.
- Mobile Marketing Set To Take Off. In conjunction with the Social Media Marketing trend described above, the interest in mobile marketing has exploded, driven by the tremendous success of and media buzz around Apple’s iPhone, Google’s introduction of Android, and Apple’s introduction of the iPad. As smartphone adoption grows, mobile marketing will expand beyond mobile messaging, and make mobile email, mobile websites and mobile applications viable channels in which to conduct marketing. The combination of new devices, faster networks and new location-aware technology, will fuel this steady march toward greater significance. Some key mobile marketing trends to watch in 2011 include Location Based Services, Mobile Apps, Mobile Gaming, Event-Based Mobile Marketing, and Augmented Reality.
- Personalized Marketing Customizes Messages To Individual. Expect more personalization capability to be embedded in websites in 2011. Regular visitors to a web site will see a page based on all the information collected from previous visits. Marketers will present personalized sites to these customers by organizing information and prioritizing it based on the individual's liking. Products and services offered on those pages will be pre-configured. “Anonymous” visitors to websites will get customized messages based on referring URL, search terms, geo-location and other insights. Personalized marketing will be extended beyond the website to other digital channels, including social media marketing, mobile marketing, and email marketing.
- Social Video As A Marketing Tool Gains Momentum. Video is an incredible way to connect with people online. Until the Internet, the only way to get your video message to a mass audience was to pay for a TV commercial. Today, social media sites and video go hand in hand. Distributing video via your social networks is a powerful way to imprint your images into the memory of your customers and prospects. Video strengthens the relationships you have with existing customers and it helps prospects get to know you better. So in 2011, there will be a focus among digital marketing professionals to understand how to make the best use of Video Marketing within Social Media Marketing Strategies and Programs.
- Search Engine Optimization Gets More Complex. Customers naturally use search engines as their primary vehicle to find information on products and services. But its not a one search engine game anymore as Google’s been joined by Bing in the US market and there are important local players like China’s Baidu and Russia’s Yandex. On top of that, social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are increasingly becoming an important source for searching. Add to that search engine innovation, mobile search, and geo-location search and the job of the marketing professional to ensure their brand is on the first page of search results gets so much more complex.
- Marketing Analytics Helps Make Sense Of All The Noise. The explosion of social conversations across the many online channels is providing marketers with a never ending stream of incoming data. The challenge for marketing professionals is to turn all that data into insights and then develop strategies/actions based on those insights. Marketing analytics applications can help, but they need to get better at integrating data from all sources (web, search, video, mobile, and social conversations). Analytic applications will also need to get smarter and more predictive about customer buying preferences based on all that data. In 2011, I expect to see a focus on the development of advanced analytic capabilities that can identify, analyze and describe patterns within all the information “noise”, giving marketing professionals important predictive insights they can use for making better decisions.
- Real Time Web Assistance Connects Buyer With Experts. Online customers and consumers are some of the most impatient and demanding around. They expect answers from your online support group right away. Live chat services allow operators to interact with online customers and respond to their questions quickly, helping you convert web queries into customers and site traffic into transactions. In 2011 watch for leading edge companies to combine the use of Twitter customer service accounts and the real-time chat services to provide ways of connecting product / service experts with customers in real-time in order to solve customer business issues.
- Online Privacy Concerns Continue. Privacy issues continue to be an important trend for marketing professionals to be out in front of as government regulators have threatened to legislate solutions if the industry does not take action by itself. Creating a secure online transactional environment is absolutely critical to a maintaining trust in customer relationships. All it takes is one significant privacy issue to negatively impact a brand. Privacy concerns from customers have forced brands like Facebook and Google to continually adjust their business models. As enterprise marketing gets more social and mobile, privacy issues must be dealt with very carefully.
- Digital Marketing Optimization Emerges As A Priority. The past few years we have seen new ‘islands’ of marketing capabilities emerge within the marketing profession. We are moving beyond Web 2.0 with all sorts of new channels and capabilities including mobile (messaging, websites, apps), rich media (video, podcasting, gaming), social media (blogs, microblogging, social networks, user generated content), and more. The state of digital marketing is such that these ‘islands’ are not well integrated into an overall cohesive strategy. In 2011 expect to see a focus from marketing leaders to focus on optimizing and integrating these separate initiatives into an overall umbrella digital marketing strategy.
So these are the online and digital marketing trends I’ll be watching closely in 2011. A look through the above list tells you that there is so happening in online marketing. As it is in almost every industry, Internet technology is totally changing the rules.
I completely agree with you, marketing has really taken a different turn in the recent times. We have to keep experimenting with new marketing strategies to survive in the respective industry. Video marketing is one of those. Nice article, has some great information about marketing.
Posted by: Account Deleted | November 26, 2010 at 02:03 AM
@Stewart...thanks for stopping by and for your comments here. I'm glad you liked the post.
Posted by: Bill Chamberlin | November 29, 2010 at 08:37 PM
Good post...I think online privacy issues will be huge in 2011 - really could change a lot of things.
Posted by: Henry | December 13, 2010 at 06:44 PM
Online privacy will be huge in 2011- could change everything.
Posted by: Henry | December 13, 2010 at 06:45 PM
@Henry...thanks for stopping by. Yes, the privacy issues our society is facing today are historical in nature. Future generations will look back to this time in history as a point in time where governments either went to great lengths to protect the privacy of the individual or they looked the other way.
Posted by: Bill Chamberlin | December 16, 2010 at 10:57 AM
Hi Bill,
With regard to item #8 above, My Customer Cloud has already made a Twitter integration available. We connect tweets into a live chat system letting businesses use Twitter for customer conversation in near real time.
Posted by: Amy Shelton | December 21, 2010 at 09:27 PM
i like to read your posts. thanks for this one.
Posted by: Devremülk | January 01, 2011 at 05:33 PM
I believe that technology doesn't stop from ones innovation to another. From generation to generation knowledge are upgraded beyond all ideas and come up come up to a better innovation. Marketing strategies changes according to trend as well. From a years ago marketing uses hard copies and all adds to attract consumers. Now marketing has another phase towards it. Social media was the most powerful tool that help advertisers minimize effort but attract wide range of consumers.
Posted by: Lawyer Social Marketing | January 21, 2011 at 05:05 AM
You make some great points, but I actually see #10 as a pitfall. Digital marketing IS becoming a priority, but shouldn't the priority always be effective and efficient marketing? The right selection of the digital marketing "islands" you refer to provides effective, efficient marketing, but the wrong or no selection (let's just try all of it) is a great way to overextend marketing spend and company time. As an added problem, when content is pushed out in real-time, mistakes are easier to make, and brands can be damaged faster. I 100% agree digital marketing has the best options 99% of the time... but when "digital marketing" in GENERAL becomes a priority rather than a field in which to find EFFECTIVE marketing, I see potential problems.
Posted by: Digital Marketing | January 24, 2011 at 04:09 PM
Nice post, Bill.
I do agree with the previous comment re. #10. The focus needs to be on optimising the use of digital AND/OR traditional tactics over time, based on insights about each specific target audience in each market, plus meaningful ongoing metrics. No two audiences will be the exactly same, so the mix of activities that work for one audience won't necessarily work for another.
One of the key challenges I see for 2011 is the seemingly limitless number of ways we can engage with each targeted audience. (Just think of all those new ‘islands’ of marketing capabilities - and then consider the myriad of different social sites globally...)
I think the days are numbered where multi-nationals can simply create materials for: TV, print, banner ads, text links, company web pages etc and have each market localise and traffic them into the local versions of their set media channels. To provide optimal relevance, a digital marketing strategy needs to be locally crafted for each targeted audience in each market, based on that audience's psychographics and online & offline behaviors. That will require significant changes in research & analytics capabilities, business processes, funding models etc.
The Internet certainly has turned into a game changer for marketing.
Posted by: rohetherington | January 26, 2011 at 11:50 PM
Great article! I love it. I learned that we should always be updated in technology. Thanks for the new trends, I learned a lot.
Posted by: marion | March 11, 2011 at 01:18 AM
Completely agree - integration will be the key for 2011 - it cant be fully optimised without being so.
Posted by: Karen Botha | March 22, 2011 at 05:26 AM
Hi!your post is very cool and Very interesting post - Might be old new, but it was new to me.
Posted by: MBT Shoes | March 30, 2011 at 03:35 AM
This is marketing evolution: As the world becomes more advanced, the strategies, tactics, goals and standards also get advanced. And now that most of the population relies on the internet, the more it boosts marketing to keep up with the trend. But this is not to cut down the traditional ones; it is just one effective tool to bring a marketing plan into success. To be specific, it can just be part of the strategies and tactics of the whole plan itself.
Posted by: Kevin Beamer | June 14, 2011 at 09:44 AM
This is indeed so correct! Thanks for sharing.
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