2012 Digital Marketing Insights

(C4)

Digital C4 LLC
2012 Digital Marketing Insights
What a crazy time to be a digital marketer! The
opportunities are enormous and yet there are so many
things to consider as you plot your 2012 strategy. We
thought we’d try to help. We’ve outlined 12 things to
consider as you plan your strategies for the New Year.

www.digitalc4.com
Digital C4 LLC - World HQ
4804 NW Bethany Blvd, STE i2140
Portland, Oregon 97229
Digital Marketing Insights - 2012 503.351.8995

(C4)

General Thoughts

While not a dramatic shift, there has been a
movement in how marketing messages are being
digested. Several years ago, marketing messages
were being PUSHED into marketplaces. Direct mail,
email, general advertising stood on their own as
tactics and strategies. Today with a networked

2012
Internet –social media gatherings and hubs –
decisions are now more complex. Social networks are
influencing corporate purchasing decisions from
staplers to enterprise software or hardware.

PULL marketing – providing information designed to move people
through sales cycles (without being salesy) is and will continue to
play a greater role in the purchasing decision. So how will you
deliver this information and content? A social media network? A
blog? By being visible on Google, Yahoo or Bing? It will depend
on where your target audience is online and how they prefer to
digest content; that’s the question.


(C4)

Search Engine Marketing

Google will continue to make algorithm
changes that center on ‘fresh’ content
Google made a number of changes this year that effected search results,
including introducing Panda and a number of evolutions therein, and most
recently Freshness. These change all involved content – or more directly the
importance on creating and producing well-written, new, fresh content. Does
your marketing plan contain a strategy for content creation and marketing?
Do you have an active blog that is well-optimized? This will become more vital
next year than it was this year!


(C4)


Google+, and Pages for Google+, will
emerge as important SEO tools for
businesses.
Google owns search marketing – and certainly owns organic search traffic
that converts. They are going to, and have begun to, place priority on content
posted on their own properties – especially those that are fledgling. Establish
a corporate Google+ Profile, and a Google+ Page for your company, and post
your fresh, well-written content. Until someone overcomes Google in search
dominance, you need to play their game. That game, right now, is Google+.


(C4)


Microsoft will acquire Yahoo and make
some inroads in search marketing share of
business.
Okay, I wouldn’t go out and play the stock market on this insight, but there
were many rumors in 2011 of a Yahoo acquisition and, even though the first
attempt by Microsoft never developed, we can only see this building up steam
again in 2012. A Bing-Yahoo merger, if you will, makes complete sense given
their current search partnership, and we also think a combined organization is
greater than its individual parts. If you’re focused solely on Google, are you
ready for a larger search competitor? We’re paying close attention to this
possibility.


(C4)


Social media will continue to play a
significant role in search visibility (SEO).
Social networks are growing. Conversations around brands, products, and
services are multiplying. If search engines were to ignore these dialogues they
would be eliminating the most relevant brand-centric conversations on the
web. They won’t. We’ve seen social content grow in favor in the eyes of all
search engines. So, if you’re not participating in these conversations, or at
least posting your fresh content in social networks, then you’re not helping to
tip the scales in one way or the other. Tip the scales in your favor by posting
consistently to your brand’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus
Pages. Don’t miss this marketing opportunity and don’t underestimate the
‘Like’.


(C4)

Content Creation & Blogging

Content will be promoted from ‘King’ to
‘Emperor’ status.
As we mentioned in the first point in the Search Marketing section, Google’s
continued push for well-written, relevant, and fresh content will drive budgets
to content marketing in 2012. In fact, content marketing will likely take budget
from traditional marketing channels such as email and direct mail. Web
content will play a greater role in purchasing decisions. This reflects the shift in
marketing, from a PUSH to a PULL, which we mentioned in our opening
summary. Now that the Search Engines are indexing ‘fresh content’ the way
they are, it is now one of the major drivers in ‘pull’ marketing efforts.


(C4)


Active blogs will continue to boost online
brand visibility.
Content creation in the form of corporate blogs will continue to play a major
role in search engine optimization efforts. Fresh, new content, that’s well
written and optimized will help drive improved search engine rankings and
increased organic site traffic. The key here is that the blogs need to be well
optimized – not over-optimized – around your selected keywords. Proper use
of keywords in titles, Meta data, and copy, with smart hyperlinking, can make
all the difference.


(C4)


Content curation will continue to enjoy
strong growth.
As the need for content in all forms intensifies, the ability to write original
content, at increased quantities, will become difficult. As such, content
curation - which is defined as the process of finding, organizing and sharing
content – will continue to grow as a content marketing strategy. In other
words, it will become more common to find content on the web that isn’t
original (or yours), write and share your thoughts about it, and post and share
it back to the world on your blog, social network pages, and website. This
process of curating content grew tremendously in 2011 and will become
more common, and necessary, in 2012.


(C4)


More and more websites will adapt a blog
format.
Most sites these days are full of static content and can be classified as online
brochures – certainly not SEO friendly under the current search ranking
requirements. We think there will be a greater blend – a merger if you will –
between corporate sites and their respective blogs. You can already see
many sites adopting some typical blog functionality, such as social media
sharing. In 2012 we see more and more sites being smart about adopting
more blog functionality, such as dynamic content creation, sharing, and
commenting.


(C4)

Social Media

Facebook will continue to dominate
the consumer social media networking
landscape.
All the talk about Google+ becoming the dominant social media network, and
overtaking Facebook, is over-hyped in our opinion. Facebook has an
established, loyal, base of users and they continue to make improvements
that will benefit that base. While Facebook’s growth has slowed – and how
could it not – it will not be caught be Google+ anytime soon (or anytime).
Google+ may end up being more of a business-to-business (B2B) network
than a consumer focused social network like Facebook, and possibly even
more of a threat to LinkedIn. Point here is that Facebook is dominant and will
be for some time. Don’t ignore the need to be participating.


(C4)

Social Media

Facebook is becoming an ecommerce
platform that brands shouldn’t ignore.
Do you sell products or services via an ecommerce shopping cart on your site?
With Facebook’s massive size and their ability to associate a variety of products
and attributes with your network friends, they are quickly making their mark as a
platform for ecommerce transactions. Imagine running a Facebook ad that sends
potential buyers to a Facebook landing page that highlights your product. Now
imagine that they can go through the entire shopping cart to checkout process
without ever leaving Facebook! It’s been studied that when people are ‘in’
Facebook they don’t want to be taken ‘out’ of the social network. So keep them
in by using Facebook as an ecommerce platform. It's worth noting, many
ecommerce engines are beginning to make it very easy to integrate with
Facebook pages.


(C4)

Social Media

Twitter will continue to evolve their
advertising offering; creating opportunity.
Advertising on Twitter now is still a win-lose situation. There are some
companies that are finding value, and yet others, by running ads, are losing
the social media credibility that they’ve built. This ‘win-lose situation’ will likely
change with their newly announced Brand Pages. While not available to all
businesses yet, they should be available sometime in early 2012. In addition
to potential advertising space, these Brand Pages will allow for a better user
experience, and provide companies the ability to incorporate more of the
profile capabilities that come with Google+ and Facebook.


(C4)

Social Media

Social media will chip away at traditional
marketing budgets to play a greater role in
lead generation.
Social media plays a role in today’s lead generation effort that’s greater than
most companies give it credit for. Companies use traditional media channels,
like direct mail, email, radio, and television, to send out their messages and
special offers that tout how great their products and solutions are, and of
course they should. However, social media networks use ‘crowd sourcing’ to
serve up information on how well those products and solutions work from the
voice of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’. Social networks are where people feel they
can find the truth from those they trust. Capitalize on the social media
opportunity to influence this conversation.


(C4)

Questions?

Got a question about any of
these insights? Got some
insights of your own you’d
care to share? Email us at
Insights@DigitalC4.com.


2012 Digital Marketing Insights

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Similaire à 2012 Digital Marketing Insights

Similaire à 2012 Digital Marketing Insights (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

2012 Digital Marketing Insights