7 Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2013
2012 was a tremendous year in the Digital Marketing world! With all the dynamics around mobile, social media and cloud, marketers and website developers have been stretched to keep up with the latest trends. Now is the time to look ahead and see what’s coming next.
Here’s what we expect in 2013:
1) Every new website will be responsive
In 2013, responsiveness will reach late adopters and will make the final move from the “nice-to-have” to the “must-have” category. And when we talk about responsive, we don’t just mean responsive design on mobile devices. In 2013, we will see centrally managed content coming to many more places – smart TVs, cars, point-of-sale, in-store kiosks and hopefully even Google Glass. That will require more sophisticated content transformations than what today’s CSS-based responsive design offers.
2) Cloud will become the first choice for hosting websites
As customers continue to seek to reduce costs and increase their scalability, cloud becomes a natural first choice. Moreover, with Marketing departments looking for the easiest way to run their websites, we will see growing interest in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, such as Windows Azure, and for CMS systems provided as service (SaaS).
3) Marketers will start adopting Big Data to make better decisions
Today’s analytics, marketing automation, CRM and various transactional systems gather huge amounts of data about customers. It’s time to connect all this data and discover information we didn’t even ask for.
4) WCM will continue to move to CXM, from content to customers
Nowadays, anybody can publish content. The real challenge is to deliver the right content to the right people, at the right time, through the right channel in the way that drives customer engagement. Today’s CMS systems will transform into CXM systems and customers will become the central point of their focus whereas content management will be only one part of the puzzle.
5) CXM systems will become a central platform for digital marketing
This prediction is related to the previous one. As CMS systems transform into CXM and become more focused on customers, they will serve as a central communication platform that will integrate or replace existing systems. Customers will realize they have too many tools that do not talk to each other and they will search for a fully integrated solution, just as they did with ERP systems in the past.
6) Marketers will rely more on external agencies to execute their digital marketing strategies
With growing complexity of digital marketing, companies will lack in-house expertise in both marketing and IT and will look more to external agencies to execute their strategies. At the same time, agencies will be more rewarded based on performance.
7) Internet users will be more concerned about privacy and ownership of their content
With recent privacy and content ownership issues around Facebook, Instagram and other services, customers will be more cautious about their privacy and content. Is 2013 going to be the year when people actually read EULAs and Terms of Service before checking the box “I read and agree”?
What do you expect in 2013? Did we miss anything? Please post your comments below.