By Liz O’Neill, Published November 12, 2014
The marketing industry is growing up fast. And to stay competitive, marketers are relinquishing traditional methods in favor of innovative new tools and strategies, many of which use an unbelievable amount of behavioral data to prioritize the customer experience like never before.
These top 3 digital marketing trends grant a glimpse into the not-so-faraway future of marketing. If you feel like a Jetson at the end of the post (if you even get there, you distractible user, you), don’t be surprised.
1. The “Digital” in “Digital Marketing” Is Becoming Obsolete
The Trend: Buyers are no longer just tech-savvy. They’re tech-dependent. The average adult spends 11 hours a day with digital media. That’s 4,015 minutes per year. And that figure is bound to go up. The term “digital marketing” is now redundant. If you’re marketing strategy isn’t rooted in digital media, you can’t really call it marketing.
What It Means: Marketing is starting to prioritize and organize around the customer experience, rather than around the digital channels (social, email, search, etc.) that the customer uses. But many companies still organize their teams around digital channels or buying stages. We’ll start to see major shifts in organizational structures in the year to come.
2. “Chief Marketing Technologist” Is a Role on the Rise
The Trend: Marketing and technology can no longer be isolated from one another. Since technology is the new customer experience, so too must it be the new marketer’s experience. The Chief Marketing Technologist will be the key role to converge silos and provide a roadmap for delivering a seamless customer experience.
What It Means: Marketing isn’t about advertising anymore. It’s about driving new business models. The industry is more measurable and transparent than ever before thanks to the massive amount of data we can access through new marketing tools and technologies.
But to be successful marketers can’t be led by their tools. They need to be lead by the customer. The marketing technologist will be the person to pull the disparate data and marketing software together, and will provide a roadmap for harnessing our new powers to serve our customers.
3. Responsive Design Matters More Than Ever
The Trend: Responsive design has become less of a trend and more of a requirement. Before the end of this year, mobile users will eclipse web users. 85% of adults think a company’s mobile website should be just as good or better than their desktop website. And, according to a survey by Google, 48% of users said that if a site didn’t look good on their smartphone, they felt like the company didn’t care about their business.
What It Means: Companies that don’t provide seamless experiences for their customers across all devices will lose out on business. Your content needs to be everywhere your customer is. And as customers adopt new devices to browse the web, brands must put practices in place that allow them to adapt to and feed these new devices their content.
Consumer technology is growing at an exponential rate. And the more advanced it gets, the more buyers demand seamless experiences tailored to their specific needs. As these 2014 trends show, marketers are starting to meet those demands through innovative technologies and practices of their own.
What will separate the winners from the rest of the pack is how well brands can adapt to this rapid change, and put internal processes in place that embrace it.
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