Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Top 3 Marketing Trends in 2013 (So Far)

At the end of 2012, the top marketing trends and predictions focused on gamification, mobile marketing and content marketing. Now that we're halfway through 2013, did these predictions hold up? Has mobile marketing hit its saturation point? Is the focus still on content and a broad social media and mobile presence? Let's take a look at how these predictions held up, and how they changed.

Mobile Marketing - is still on the rise. If growth continues at the current rate, by 2015 more users will access the internet through mobile devices than their computers. It's just a fact - when your phone is a portable computer you will use it whenever you don't have your laptop or desktop. Thanks to smartphones, every minute of someone's waking day could potentially be spent online. It's not a coincidence that 42.8% of marketers planned to increase their marketing spending in 2013, it's just good business sense.

Content Marketing - Recently, there's been an emphasis on content. Not just amount of content, but quality of content. With the advent of the blog, the initial theory (and instinctual impulse) was to just put as much information out there as possible. Update as often as possible and let the rest sort itself out. Now is the time to sort all that content out. Companies are re-evaluating their approach to content. How they organize, how they curate it, whether quality of content is more important then quantity of content, and the hammer is coming down on the side of quality. Producing less content, but of a higher quality is proving itself to be a better strategy then providing a lot of content without much consideration to content. While having a blog filled with posts back to 2007 is impressive, readers would rather not have to slog through a lot of mediocre content to get to the gems. Instead, they would rather read only the best of your posts, even if there are fewer. 

Gamification - is a relatively recent marketing innovation, that's seen a lot of use in the beverage and food industry. Essentially, it turns marketing strategies into a game. The most classic example is when companies hold contests or surveys and let the consumers decide what the new candy flavor will be, or the logo, or the mascot. An adaptation of this strategy to the internet, particularly to social media, is to offer prizes or rewards based on likes, shares and re-tweets. For instance, if you share a certain link x amount of times, you get a special reward, rank or badge. Companies have also arranged internet "scavenger hunts" where consumers unlock certain rewards at each level, where each level involves some form of promotion, purchase or use of the product. 

Whether these trends continue, or some new marketing strategies arise to take their place remain to be seen. What trends have you noticed so far? Is there any marketing strategy that you're glad to see go? Let us know in the comments below twitter and facebook


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