The Future of Marketing
Marketing is an evolving field. You’re in doubt? Ask chief marketing officers. Or maybe just observe what companies are doing. If you’ve kept a track on what they’ve been doing since, say, 2010, you’d see key changes. That means what we’re doing today isn’t going to be what we will do in the future.
What can we expect?
1. Marketing will be mostly mobile
When the Economist Intelligence Unit asked 499 respondents, who were all chief or senior marketers, 59% of them said mobile devices and networks will have the biggest impact on marketing organizations by 2020.
More people are accessing the cyber space through their mobile devices. Smartphones and tablets are popular because they cater to the needs of today’s average person, who is always on go. Today, half of the web traffic comes from these devices. Trends show that more people will be going mobile, and marketers will have to respond by making mobile-friendly campaigns.
2. Personalization will take a huge chunk in marketing resources
Generic marketing campaigns and ads no longer work like they used to because the internet is already saturated with them. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that people’s buying decisions and consumer behavior are influenced by their age, education, professional status, and location. Factor in the varying personalities of a target market and you’ll get a heterogeneous audience. People just want to feel you’re connecting to them, not selling to them, and one way to do that is through varying your talking points. Appeal to their age, location, culture, and collective psychology.
3. Social media will gain more prominence in digital marketing
In the same survey conducted by Economist Intelligence Unit, 63% expect customers to experience their marketing efforts on social media by 2020.
People are not just accessing the web through their portable devices. They are connecting with everyone else. The networks we build online became ripe grounds for marketers. Social media marketing is only taking bigger chunks in overall marketing budgets of companies due to the rising relevance of social media in people’s lives. It is also worth noting that the biggest social sites are also adjusting to the changing needs and behavior of the users, thus averting premature extinction. That means with social media giants learning from the mistakes of their predecessors and getting smarter, it seems social media is going to stay for a longer while.
One thing will not change, though. Companies will keep assessing the effectiveness of their strategies through revenue impact and brand awareness. However, fewer marketers are thinking that customer acquisition is a reliable metric for measuring marketing effectiveness. On the other hand, more people in the marketing industry are eyeing budget efficiency as a means of assessing the reliability of a strategy.
