10 Digital Marketing Trends for 2013

This blog posting is one of my favorite series, I’ve been posting a list of 10 digital marketing trends in ’11 and ’12.

So what’s expected to happen in 2013?

Brazil has the FIFA Confederations Cup in preparation for the ’14 World Cup, the US has a fiscal cliff to climb and together with the EU an imbalance on revenues and expenses to address.  The NFL has some skulls to crack to fix their concussions problems, those employed in the US will hire the unemployed in foreign lands (read more outsourcing), more foreigners will purchase US land, buildings, businesses and IP, and of course, VP Biden is the newly assigned czar on gun control.

IMHO, 2013 will follow Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

So here they are: The top 10 digital marketing trends of 2013.

10. Gamification – “All Play and no Work makes Jack a rich boy!”

9.  Cloud computing enables scalability to allow for new experiences in video games

8.  Digital Content across devices enables personalization that follows users across platforms

7.  TV is old.  It’s still king of the screens, but it’s content that folks want anytime, anywhere on all four screens. 

6.  The Smartphone begins its attack on plastic in mobile payments.

5.  Tag Management becomes a competitive imperative

4.  Users prefer mobile devices when reading magazines and shopping

3.  Social Media Mainstream and Niches continue to grow, especially in Emerging Markets except China

2.  Big Data will lead to consumer insights and smarter experiences at the speed of light

1.   The glory goes to the man in the arena and not their bankers and consultants.  

10.  Gamification – “All Play and no Work makes Jack a rich boy!”

So have you seen websites that try to encourage your behavior by offering you a little badge for doing something?  Foursquare gives you a badge when you check into the same place three times for example.  Dashlane offers badges when you save passwords in their password and credit card maintenance software, and Fitocracy makes working out with your friends a competitive game.  Users can Level Up by improving their bench press and earning a badge, post it to facebook and let the world know about their development.

As Daniel Pink will tell you in his book, Drive, human nature is best motivated by a sense of purpose, autonomy and self-mastery.  These types of immediate rewards for accomplishing small tasks might seem like it’s meant for grade school kids, but the data doesn’t lie.  Gamification increases engagement, helps users spend more time on site, and

that drives ad revenue and subscriptions since folks tend to develop a sense of being invested based on the recognition and the bragging they’ve done on social networks.

We’ve come a long way from that LinkedIn profile bar that showed 90%complete.

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10 Most Common Web Analytics Mistakes

So you want to know the most frequent questions I get about web analytics and online marketing? I’ve tried to present them here and answer a few of them so maybe I can save you, my clients and future prospects some time so we can get onto executing profitable campaigns.

1) Free analytics are good for my business and are just as good as paid ones

Coremetrics Platform offers more than Google Analytics

First, let me say, I like Google Analytics and Yahoo’s Analytics solutions. But Google Analytics was built for Google. It serves their interest, not yours.

This might be the most common myth out there, and possibly one of the most dangerous. First and foremost, to directly dispel this rumor, the truth is that enterprise analytics solutions offer levels of detail and capabilities that free solutions such as Google Analytics don’t. Although free solutions can be hacked to a certain extent to extend their capabilities, at the end of the day they fall far short of the paid solutions in providing meaningful reports to a diversified group of stakeholders. If for example you had any interest in tracking the video drop off rates, or immediately integrating custom analytics events, records or values with a recommendations engines, you can’t.

The Omniture Online Marketing Suite offers a platform to manage the online marketing discipline for sophisticated digital marketers.

Beyond capabilities alone, you also get a lot of important side benefits as well. First amongst them is accountability and support. With free solutions you’re not paying for anything, so you get a community of blogs and consultants, which we belong to actually. If you’re paying for a solution, and if for any reason it has a problem, we’ve got help from the analytics provider to get the job done.

With paid solutions you own your data and can integrate it seamlessly with PPC bid management platforms, multi-variate testing platforms, and a host of other add-ons and integrations like Salesforce, NetSuite, SugarCRM, email marketing solutions, ad-server networks and more.

The future of analytics is in an analytics suite approach, not in point solutions. Of course, if you want to own your own data from Google Analytics, they offer a license to purchase Urchin for approximately $3,400 (the company that Google acquired in 2004 that is today known as Google Analytics). The future of analytics isn’t more data, but instead the ability to act upon that data in an a fast, efficient, and measurable way. Free solutions will never offer the level of integrated optimization that paid solutions do, and due to the great competitive advantage that such features offer, a business should be wary of the risk that going “free” might entail. Bottom line: If your business relies on the internet, you should investigate using a paid analytics platform. I have seen cases where the answer is to stay on a free solution, but more often than not, it’s time to increase conversions and there’s too much at stake to penny pinch.

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Defining an Online Marketing Strategy and Roadmap

Check out our latest video developed to assist Internet Marketers in developing an integrated and cohesive digital marketing strategy.

Please let us know you’re feedback, we’re launching a series of theses and would love to hear what you think.

The importance of landing pages

2 websites that every marketer must know about

If you haven’t heard of Slideshare and Scribd, it’s time.  Everyone knows about YouTube – the tagline is “Broadcast Yourself”.  But not all businesses have produced meaningful videos that they are ready to distribute.  However, I would argue that just about every B2B business has power points and documents they share with clients and prospects.  And if your business has a capabilities brief, marketing collatoral, sales presentation, sales demonstration, or other supporting documentation along the marketing and sales cycle, you should consider posting them in slideshare and scribd.

Slideshare - Present Yourself

Scribd

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Developing Your Online Marketing Strategy starts with segmentation

To identify your most important segments you may consider looking at your most profitable clients.  Prospects that have similar characteristics may reach beyond demographic segmentation, often referred to as firmographics, but may extend to psychographics.  If you’re a professional services firm in the B2B space, consider this chart.  This well known Boston Consulting Group matrix has some fundamental assumptions that since its development in the 1970′s have been improved with more sophisticated models.  However, for the purposes of starting your segmentation it offers a valid framework for assessing the types of clients you may wish to pursue.  It’s difficult to ask your lead how they think, but by observing the type of company they work for you may be able to learn a lot about how the purchasing cycle is about to go.  As in B2C marketing, psychographic segmentation can be an effective tool in identifying your next big deal.

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How digital marketers can develop their online marketing strategy

Here at Lima Consulting we use a 4 step process to help organizations develop, deploy and measure digital strategies.

Digital Marketing Strategic Planning Framework

Just this week alone we met with four companies, two of which are non-profits, and shared this methodology with them.  In all four cases, the marketing team had several tactics underway, such as an attempt to use Google Adwords, Google Analytics in some cases re-designs and launches to existing websites.  But the strategies, tactics and campaigns were not mapped back to their business objectives. read more