As 2011 comes to its close, what can marketers expect over the next 12 months, especially when it comes to bettering their company’s return on investment (ROI)?
We all know the economy is still far from stellar, but that doesn’t mean your company’s marketing budget needs to be ripped apart in the coming year. With properly designed marketing campaigns, businesses small and large can meet or even exceed their goals.
According to a StrongMail survey of close to 1,000 business leaders conducted by Zoomerang, 51 percent of businesses plan to increase their marketing efforts in 2012, with 41 percent keeping things at their present levels. Marking the third straight year, e-mail marketing and social media marketing remain the prime targets where marketers plan to increase their spending.
In looking at a number of opinions in recent months on the web, here are some of the trends that are expected to impact the marketing arena in 2012:
- Merging of online and offline marketing – Companies such as social media king Facebook have already been merging online and offline marketing, but look for more to go that route over the next 12 months. Facebook and its Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology have drawn both praise and criticism. Proponents argue it helps to bring the online and offline worlds together, while critics argue it is a little too intrusive. The bottom line is it will take some businesses more time to understand and use to their advantage the merging of online and offline marketing, while others have already thrown their hat in the ring. The bottom line is businesses that currently do not have a high or engaging online presence will need to change their ways over the next year or find themselves falling further behind competitors who do;
- Mobile to the max – Although some businesses may have been reluctant over the last year to do it, having a mobile format to cater to customers in 2012 is important. Given that consumers use their iphones for a variety of tasks as it is, providing them with information, deals, coupons etc. through their mobile phones will increase the opportunities to market one’s products and services;
- Cross-channeling strategy – Marketers will look to do more with a fully integrated, cross-channel strategy. In doing so, they will team that with mobile payment and social media engagement, bringing a better shopping and purchasing experience to the customer;
- Becoming even more social – While there are still hold out companies when it comes to social media, more and more businesses seem to be getting the message that they need to be social and not anti-social in today’s business world. Marketers will likely look to do more with social media advertising, allowing them to zero in on a specific demographic with their ads. According to a report from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketers in 2010 increase their usage of social media on YouTube (47 percent increase), LinkedIn (39 percent increase), Twitter (35 percent increase) and Facebook (30 percent increase);
- Email marketing adding steam – When it first began, email marketing may have seemed rather plain and uninviting. Now, however, marketers can be creative with more enticing sign-up forms as they construct a list of potential clients. While some may believe that email is becoming archaic, the simple facts are it isn’t. According to web monitoring service Royal Pingdom, 1.9 billion e-mailers accounted for 107 trillion emails being sent in 2010;
- Data, data and more data – Speaking of data, marketers and their companies need to be compiling and analyzing the data that describes the customer shopping experience from start to finish. Understanding the customer service history and their purchasing behavior is important in order to manage those relationships and begin new ones too.
While these are but a few of the expected trends in 2012 for marketers, keep in mind that the overall health of the U.S. economy will go a long way in determining just how successful marketers are in achieving their goals.