23 Jan Looking at trends. Is digital marketing growing up?
It’s that time of year when you tend to look forwards. What will the year bring? How will it compare to last year? Is it going to be a good summer? This time last year I wrote about 10 digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2010 and I’ve just gone back and re-read them. Strikingly it occurred to me that whilst most of what had been written about had indeed been a feature of 2010 most of it was still very much applicable this year.
Take that last point. You need to figure out how it all applies to your business – where to invest, where to test and what deserves a rest. It feels like there is a common sense approach to doing digital. Focus on your core business and what works but at the same time continue to allocate some resource to test and learn. Focus on data and drive actionable insights that help you improve what you are doing. Above all be agile.
We’ve been talking about fundamental and revolutionary change for a while now. Yep, web 2.0 and everything that is social was certainly that. But now? There’s still loads of learning to be done and each day brings something new in terms of the toolset at our disposal but what about the principles? Aren’t we figuring those out? At the same time we are also realizing that some of those principles that represented good marketing in our traditional world still represent good marketing in our digital world.
Integration. We really are thinking about multichannel now and we are even starting to define multichannel roles within the organisations we work in. Those organisations are starting to think beyond the big idea, tone of voice and creative execution. They are starting to figure out how to deliver integrated marketing campaigns across multiple channels. Words like conversation, engagement, participation and sharing are becoming part of every marketers vocabulary.
It’s often simple and unifying approaches that help you find solutions to complex problems. Delivering integrated marketing campaigns can feel like one of those problems. So bring it back to the basics. The building blocks – content, distribution, platforms, people and measurement. Developing a content strategy across your owned, earned and bought media that delivers specific objectives across the customer journey is perhaps one of those unifying approaches.
Focus on your core business. Apply well-understood marketing principles. Join things up and find simple unifying approaches to tackle complex problems. Is digital marketing growing up? Feels like it might be.
I found the eye-phone pic on Annie Corriveau’s blog. Thanks. It made me chuckle.