While the end of the year is often a chance for people to recap the highs and lows, I think it’s a time to look forward. Now is the time to set ambitious goals, analyze the marketplace and put together a plan for how to attack those goals in the coming year. In that spirit, I’m putting my market analysis to work with these five predictions, along with some tactical suggestions, for exceeding your marketing goals in 2011.
1. Hyper-local
As I’ve tracked Foursquare this year, it has grown from half a million users to over 5 million in just the last nine months. That’s faster growth than both Twitter and Facebook. They are just one of many players getting into, or beefing up their location based social media business, including Gowalla, Whrrl, Loopt, and SCVNGR. Of course, a marketing opportunity like this is too small to ignore for Facebook, who also introduced Facebook Places this year. The growth of these services has been the ability to connect social networks and information with marketing offers from businesses. Consumers have shown their willingness to give up personal information, including location at an exact moment in time, in exchange for a special or a deal. There’s tremendous power in being able to target a person at the point and moment of purchase, and I predict we’ll see a lot more creativity over the next year from businesses utilizing these services.
2. Hyper-targeting
Not only are consumers willing to give up location data, but Facebook’s Open Graph allows them to tell us even more about their “likes.” Google made billions being able to help marketers target users based upon keywords, but Facebook’s potential for targeting is potentially a 100 times better. Marketers are able to target audiences not just based on demographics, psychographics, or keyword searches, but other products, services, and things they like. I predict that over the next year, there will be a surge in marketing messaging at a broader variety of target markets. As marketing and social network integration continue, more advertising will be dynamically generated based upon, not only your “likes,” but also upon your friends and their suggestions. Don’t be surprised if you see more advertising that speaks directly to you.
3. Mobile is Social (and vice versa)
Going along with my first two predictions, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a dividing line between mobile and social. the growth of smartphones has given nearly everyone the ability to access almost any type of information from anywhere they are. What used to be known as the “phone” is really an all-encompassing information and communications device. This has been reflected in the sales of both desktop and laptop computers, and several businesses have stated that they will begin designing and planning for mobile platforms first.
Our phones give us the ability to communicate with each other, and brands we want to interact with, either through written (email, text, and wall postings), verbal (phone calls, messages), and visual (pictures, graphics, video). My point, albeit somewhat long winded, is that, if we want to communicate or be social with each other, or with brands, its now possible with the modern generation of “phones.” I think you’ll see more people opt for mobile solutions – phones, tablets, etc. – than traditional desktops or stationary devices, and that will have a significantly larger impact on how marketers craft their messages over the next year.
4. Better Understanding of ROI
One of the advantages of online advertising has been the ability to look at quantitative results – hits, views, etc. However, social media has made measurement a little more confusing. How do you measure customer relationship building? So far, it has been pretty rudimentary, measuring things such as “Likes” or tweets, or number of conversations. Some have even evolved to measure sentiment (are they saying good or bad things about us?). I believe that this will be the year that smarter measurements will emerge, particularly those which connect relationship building to sales and recommendations. While this evolution will see plenty of growth over the next year, I believe it will still be a few years before these measurements are tested and become the standards by which we can all measure success.
5. Focus and Simplicity
It’s nearly impossible to navigate the overwhelming amount of places to interact with and speak to customers – company websites, blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp!, Quora, and the list goes on and on. Thus far, marketers and businesses have tried to keep up and be everywhere their customers could potentially be. I predict that this year, overload will take over, forcing many businesses to evaluate the best places to be. This evaluation will lead to focusing in on the avenues which provide the most bang for the buck. However, in an effort to continue to reach everyone with the least amount of effort, I suspect you’ll see many tools emerge this year which pull together interactions from multiple locations into a single place for marketers. This will make it simpler for marketers to keep up with all of these customer touchpoints, although, even these services have to draw the line at how many they can provide support for.
2011 will certainly be an exciting year for marketers, and especially those in the business of social marketing and community building. What are your thoughts on these predictions, and what predictions would you add to this list?
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