A new year always prompts reflection on the past and visualizing what we want for the future. Looking back is necessary to understand what worked and what didn’t, but it’s a whole different story looking into the crystal ball. The real challenge comes in taking the right calculated risks to achieve your personal, and your company’s, maximum potential.

While it’s not a good idea to blindly adopt what others are doing, it is a good idea to know where things are trending in your marketplace. The good news is, marketing budgets are up again -- half of businesses are increasing their marketing budgets in 2011.¹ A majority of the marketing dollars are being allocated to email marketing, social media, search and mobile. What makes these communication vehicles so attractive to professional marketers?

Email Marketing – Alive and Well. Email marketing has been around since the advent of the internet and it’s holding strong. Email can be a highly effective marketing communication tool, both from a cost and conversion standpoint and it’s currently the number one method in which people share information. Sixty-five percent of companies are increasing their email budgets for 2011 with a focus on increasing subscriber engagement, improving segmentation and targeting, and integration with social media. The integration of email and social media strategies (social sharing) has increased 270 percent over the past year and it is believed that social sharing can help in accomplishing measurable objectives such as list growth, lead generation, and ROI.² Emails that include social sharing on such sites as Facebook and Twitter also generate higher click-thru-rates than emails without the sharing capability.

Social Media – Explosive. The use of social media will continue to rise in 2011. Not only is it a low cost tool that provides businesses a way to communicate and engage with customers and prospects, it brings brands to consumers on a personal level, making them feel alive and human. According to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 91 percent of businesses surveyed currently use social media to market their business and 67 percent of marketers plan on increasing their use of social media in the near future.

To top it off, a recent press release by ComSCORE, a leader in measuring the digital world, indicated that Facebook led all online publishers in Q3 2010 with 297 billion display ad impressions. That’s a 23.1 percent share of the total market. Twitter is also challenged to keep up with advertiser demand since they rolled out “Promoted Tweets” and “Promoted Trends.” Eighty of the nation’s largest brand advertisers including Ford, Coke, Microsoft, Google and Verizon, have signed on and Twitter has increased their sales staff tenfold to meet this increased volume. YouTube also has some staggering stats. Last year the company reported having over 2 billion views a day and in December announced that 35 hours of video is being uploaded every minute.

Search – A Marketing Must. Search remains one of the top four programs where marketing dollars are being allocated in 2011. In a recent StrongMail survey, 41 percent of companies surveyed plan to increase their search spending, while only five percent plan to decrease spending in this area. An iProspect Search Results Study conducted in 2008, which focused on search engine user behavior, indicates why search is so important to companies who want users to be able to find them easily on the web. The study found that 27 percent of search engine users only click on the first few search results and 41 percent never click beyond the first page of search results. That’s a combined total of 68 percent of users – a staggering number of people that will find you if you’re optimizing your search position, and that will miss you if they’re searching for a solution and you don’t show up on page one of their results. That is up from 48 percent in 2002. It is very clear why search continues to be a primary marketing focus in 2011.

Mobile – Join the Revolution. The mobile market has grown significantly with an estimated 293 million total subscribers³ as of June 2010, with smart phones consuming approximately 25 percent of the market share.⁴ That’s a nine percent increase in the last year and experts believe that smartphones will take the market share lead by the end of 2011. This surge is a direct result of more people wanting “on-the-go” access to the internet for such things as social networking, banking and surfing the web. This growth provides a very unique advertising opportunity – a way of advertising on a device that is almost always with the consumer.

Mobile advertising, with animated banners, full page ads, expanding ads, page takeover and videos, offers a way to reach consumers “where they are” more than ever before. Not only can you reach your targets while they’re on-the-go, but a recent study indicates that nearly 40 percent of time spent on the mobile web happens in the home.⁵

To recap, the top four trends we see: email, social media, search and mobile. We look forward to expanding on these trends for 2011 in future editions of On the Mark. We will provide more in-depth analysis and strategy on how to incorporate these trends into your marketing plan so you’re always ahead of the game.

Wishing you a happy, healthy and very prosperous New Year!

¹ StrongMail – 2011 Marketing Trends
² MarketingSherpa Special Report: The Ultimate Combo-Social, Search and eMail
³ The Nielson Company, August 2, 2010
⁴ Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, June 2010
⁵ ClickZ, September 21, 2010 .

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