Awareness Networks released insights and prognosis from 34 business and marketing leaders as part of its 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Predictions report.
Here are some of our favorites…
Mobile as a game-changer:
“The continued growth of mobile (smart phones as the primary device to access the web and use social) will totally change the game for social marketing,” expects Debi Kleiman of MITX. “Social marketing use cases and the kind of data that can be gleaned when people are using social on their phones will require brands to completely rethink how they connect and communicate with consumers.”
Gro-targeting:
“Business will catch up with mobile users in 2012,” predicts Mark Lazen of Social Media Today, “And will seriously begin to make valuable offers to their geo- located fans.”
Integration of Marketing Tools:
“More businesses will actively engage with all the stages of inbound marketing,” predicts laura Fitton of HubSpot. “Right now there’s too much focus on social media marketing and content marketing. True inbound marketing involves knowing which tactics work – which pieces of content, calls to action, forms and emails generated the most leads. It’s integrating your SEO efforts together with your content generation and sharing, with your advertising, your lead nurturing, your analytics, measurement and A/B testing, with every tool you use and everything you do as a marketer.”
Segmentation vs Social Organization:
Michael Pace of Constant Contact predicts a disparity between what will be the biggest development and what should be the biggest development of 2012. “Use of light data like Klout — using influence scores to segment marketing strategies, moving companies beyond the ‘Like’ or ‘Follower’ metrics will be the biggest development of 2012. The biggest development should be the social organization.”
Metrics Central:
“For big brands, there will be a huge focus on ROI,” says Ekaterina Walter of Intel. “Brands will be asking their agencies, vendors and internal stakeholders the hard questions, and they will be demanding the right tools to measure it. There are a multitude of tools capturing partial metrics, but the landscape is very fragmented. Brands will need a way to feed these metrics into one solution, which will aggregate, analyze and identify the right metrics that will help teams make the right decisions.”
Collaboration:
“Real-time social will push marketers to form better internal collaborations and deeper partnerships with their agencies. Collaboration will lead to better marketing, increased advocacy and better customer value,” says Lora Kratchounova of Scratch Marketing + Media.
Relevancy Marketing:
“It won’t be front-page news or sexy, but adding customer relationship management and tying social CRM functionality to marketing efforts will improve our ability as marketers to hit relevant audiences with relevant messages at relevant times and in relevant places,” predicts Jason Falls, founder of Social Media Explorer. “Companies without relevancy in messaging as a priority will fall behind.”
The Role of Big Data:
“2012 will be the year of data for social media,” predicts Mike Lewis. “Brands will stop worrying about measures that don’t impact the bottom line and shift their focus to the metrics impacting bottom-line results.”
Open APIs:
“Expect the proliferation of open APIs to unleash a wave of developer creativity and subvert the business models of many proprietary analytics and monitoring service providers, just as open-source software displaced proprietary models,” says Mark Lazen.
Cloud Services:
“The cloud is hotter and going mainstream,” says Dave Peck. “Allowing clients the ability to access your products from anywhere will be crucial in 2012.”
All About Marketing:
Michael Troiano of Holland-Mark believes that, “Social Marketing will become Marketing. It will just be what you need to do, when you’re trying to sell something to more than one person.”
See other great 2012 social predictions
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