7 Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2014
Disruptive technologies, including Cloud, Big Data, mobile and social media keep moving the boundaries of what’s possible in digital marketing. Companies need to continuously adapt their marketing strategy and tactics to remain relevant to their clients. What will be the major trends in 2014? Read further to learn what our best bets are.
1) We will see the first marketing campaigns leveraging Google Glass or similar devices.
Although it’s not clear yet wheter Google will launch their Glass this year, marketers should start thinking creatively about how to leverage the new possibilities. We expect to see the first marketing campaigns leveraging the augmented reality provided by Google Glass to deliver new, innovative and immersive experiences for customers.
2) Marketers will start consolidating their digital marketing tools into fewer solutions.
As marketers invest a growing portion of their budgets into digital marketing, they want to maximize their results by delivering consistent, personalized and context-sensitive customer experience across multiple channels. That’s a complex task when your tools operate in silos. Marketing solution vendors realize this which is why we saw many acquisitions in this space during 2013 as vendors continued to create a more complete portfolio. This year, we expect that marketers who want to take a more sophisticated approach or just want to be more efficient, will abandon some of their existing point solutions and replace them with integrated packages.
3) Online retailers will focus on the personalized experience of individual customers.
Everybody wants to provide an Amazon-like experience, but only a few have the tools and resources to do that. As Big Data and Cloud technologies make mass-scale personalization and marketing automation more accessible, more e-tailers will use them to deliver a better customer experience.
4) Responsive design will finally become a standard for the majority of new sites.
We missed the mark with this prediction last year, but we expect that by the end of 2014, new non-responsive websites will be the exception. At the same time, website owners will try to figure out how to provide their content through new devices including Google Glass, smart watches and car dashboards.
5) Marketers will look for more tangible results from social media, beyond followers and likes.
As many C-Suite executives want to see quantifiable ROI from social media, we will see a growth in use of Social CRM and Social Marketing tools that will help marketing connect their communication across channels as well as attribute sales to social media activities.
6) The PaaS and SaaS model will continue gaining popularity for website hosting.
As companies try to reduce the costs and complexity of the IT infrastructure for running their websites, they'll start choosing PaaS and SaaS options for their websites and marketing tools, leveraging the elasticity of Cloud.
7) Marketing automation will become the norm
Marketing departments are being asked to do more than ever before and to work together with sales departments more than ever before. This means delivering sales ready leads at the right time in the purchase cycle. We believe
Marketing automation will become the standard as a way to nurture and automatically engage customers throughout the lifecycle, helping marketing departments to deliver engaged sales ready leads.
What do you expect in 2014? Did we miss anything out? Please post your comments below.