- Image by Eddi van W. via Flickr
To datethese are the best trend predictions I have seen so far.
17 digital marketing trends for 2011, by Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein.
1. The Year of Pragmatism – just do it
My overall feeling for 2011 is that there isn’t anything ‘brand new’ on the immediate horizon that is going to create a fundamental shift, like search once did, or Web 2.0, or social media etc.
2011 will be somewhat less about talk and more about action. We should know by now *what* we need to be doing, the challenge is aboutexecution. And that’s about good old fashioned things like people, process and technology.
2. Joined up marketing – still the holy grail
We ran our firstJUMP event in 2010 and will do so again atJUMP 2011. It is all about how to join up online and offline marketing more intelligently. This isn’t a particularly new idea but the reality is that very few organisations are anywhere close to the nirvana of fully integrated marcoms across all customer touchpoints (including Econsultancy).
So this trend isn’t going away anytime soon and will continue to be an important focus for all marketers in 2011 and beyond.
Interestingly, if anything, 2010 was most interesting to me not for the (obvious and continued) rise of digital as a medium, but for the renaissance of ‘old media’. When I talk to the most sophisticated and advanced marketers, and the most progressive digital companies, the excitement is mostly about offline marketing. TV advertising was ‘(re)discovered’ in 2010 by many. We at Econsultancy are all excited this year by our print magazine,direct mail andtelesales plans…
3. Digital for branding – and measurement be damned
I think 2011 might finally see significantly increased spend for “brand” reasons rather than direct response / sales and other ‘hard’ metrics. But I don’t think it will necessarily be the usual brand advertiser suspects leading the charge (FMCG, Automotive etc.) though they will show some increases. Nor will it be in display advertising or paid search, though those will no doubt grow.
I believe the spend will come under headings such as‘engagement’,‘experiential marketing’, even‘customer service’. The spend will be focused increasingly on content, apps, social media and service rather than on bought media like display advertising or paid search. And it will come from small companies as well as large ones, across all sectors, notably B2B. But essentially it will be about building a brand presence online that people can engage with, relate to, and, ultimately, trust.
And, despite my love of data and analytics, I think the endless demands for super-granular ROI analyses of such activities will actually fade a little in 2011. It will become more accepted that these are things you just do. That doesn’t mean they won’t be measured but I thinkthere will be less scrutiny. In the same way that people have rediscovered the power of TV advertising because of the hard-to-measure emotive power and halo effects on other channels, “digital branding” will be considered more of a ‘no-brainer’ because it’s obvious it drives purchase intent across all channels, even if that’s hard to measure (or not cost effective to do so).
Continues @ http://econsultancy.com
