1. Continue increasing their spending on online marketing activities (content creation, blog, SEO, email marketing and paid search) and will decrease spending on their offline initiatives (direct mail, trade shows and print advertising). Given the changes in how buyer’s research products and services they want to purchase I see this trends continuing in the coming years.
2. Use social media marketing in a more effective way. As social media becomes more mature as marketing tool and more success stories emerge we will start seeing an increase in lead generation initiatives on these various platforms. Social media will also become an excellent tool for customer service and customer retention programs.
3. Mobile marketing will explode. With the emergence of all the new platforms (Apple iPhone and iPad, Googles Android) mobile marketing will move beyond mobile messaging. Mobile email, mobile websites and mobile applications will become a valuable channel for marketers in 2011
4. Concentrate on understanding their prospects behaviours online and offline to gain a deeper insight in their prospect buying cycles. Using these insights marketers will be able to produce higher converting content and marketing programs that will allow them to generate quality leads for their business.
5. Investments in marketing technology will ramp up as marketing needs more and more data and automation to be efficient. This will allow marketers to gain valuable data that will help them.
Do you see other trends that will emerge in 2011?
Companies seem to ignore the single largest online branding/advertising venue available: their own regular external emails. Why not use these emails to market the senders company?
You have a website.
You send emails.
Why not multiply your sales-staff by “wrapping” the regular email in an interactive letterhead?
No other marketing or advertising medium is as targeted as an email between people that know each other (as opposed to mass emails). These emails are always read and typically kept.
WrapMail offers a solution that is server-based (i.e. compatible with all email clients), has a complete back-office with a WrapMaker, reporting etc and it is FREE!
Alexandre – I think you hit the nail on the head! These are trends we’re seeing as Marketers look to 2011 and beyond. The explosion of channels and constant need to do more with less will keep us very busy in the new year.
I might suggest, however, two concepts.
The first is the continued path and explosion of digital. For marketers, it’s not only about development of content – but leveraging it in new chanels.
Second, whether it’s digital, offline or any other online channel, marketers need to tear down silos within their department or within their organization to integrate people, processes and technology.
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Keep up the great work!
You’re definitely right in that 2011 seems to be the year that innovative technologies take off for marketers and b2b. It seems like lots of technologies (such as social media, mobile marketing, etc.) have been in beta for the last few years. Now that we’ve gotten our feet wet, we can now show tangible results in their uses.
One technology that is a convergence of mail and internet b2b lead generation is Personalized URLs (PURLs). This is a great tool which if used effectively can net an ROI of up to 25%. Simply by sending out effective mailers, prospects can interact and visit a URL tailored specifically to them which then sends a notice to the b2b people. They can then find out what webpages were visited which can lead to a tailored sales pitch. All warm leads with effective sales pitches than can be done.
We’ve had great feedback from our clients at Ad Giants with this tool.