OUR TAKE ON KEY E-MARKETING TRENDS FOR 2011

Having distilled what the great and the good of online marketing are saying and combining it with our own knowledge and experience we reckon these will be the main areas of interest and growth in 2011.



Content and Analysis: quality content (and loads of it) will remain the crucial tool for communication, engaging through different touch-points – websites, social media, e-marketing and apps. Marketers will need to meet the challenges of increasing volumes when dealing with behavioural segmentation, ensuring their messages retain individual relevance. Key SEO criteria will have increased leverage on the creation of all communicated material.



With so much emphasis on the new media, it is suggested that referring to articles, blog posts and podcasts will be a growing feature of sales calls for many service-based industries. Analytics will be increasingly used in measuring the sales process from first click to sale.



Social media: Channel integration between social media and e-mail marketing will increase with email marketing connecting with social media via "click to share" and "like" buttons – endorsement via referral has always been recognised as extremely powerful, which is why PR continually targets influencers as well as decision makers.



Commentators emphasise how important it is for companies to be active on all the main social media platforms and to have their messages passed round the blogosphere to maintain SEO. Therefore social media takes on a more important role in the SEO strategy.



Mobile Marketing: There will be a foreseeable increase in the use of mobile devices. 80% of the US population is predicted to have a mobile in 2011. Mobiles are becoming more advanced, cheaper and lighter. The device market is shifting in favour of smartphones, which are driving mobile Internet growth. Social networks are the primary way that mobile users now exchange information with location based services (Facebook places, Foursquare) having a boom time.



An increasing use of tablets with their larger screens will boost the potential of interaction with websites, building on the smartphone’s capabilities. eMarketer Digital Intelligence forecasts that 20 million Apple iPad units will be sold in 2011, an increase of 127% over 2011. The scope of delivery for tablets is also becoming more diverse. For instance, the Samsung Galaxy Tab is able to make phone calls and send text messages.



Online/offline: LinkShare survey findings show that 68% of UK marketing professionals believe that digital budgets will increase in 2011 in spite of the rise in VAT.



There will be growing convergence between online and offline marketing leading to no separate digital discipline - the two will be run within the same strategy and be closely coordinated. E-marketing and social media could increasingly be the lead players in this, with printed and broadcast promotion eventually reflecting rather than driving online and social media campaigns. Could "As seen on Facebook" become an updated version of the adage "As seen on TV"? We shall see.



Online Video: People are watching increasing amounts of online video material and the upward trend is unstoppable. While short user generated videos will continue to gain an audience, MediaPost predicts increased competition from high quality original long form productions. Quality video designed for transmission to mobile phones will also see a huge increase. The Third Bi-annual Report of Web TV Enterprise (September 2010) showed that TV advertisers are increasingly targeting users through video content on the web and that this area "is fast becoming an integral part of their media plans and overall strategy." These findings indicate that, while online video will remain a very cost effective, expectations for content and professional delivery are likely to grow.



That’s just an outline of likely developments. How these five areas progress and inter-react with each other is another story, which we’ll be commenting on regularly throughout the year.