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A Guide to Marketing in 2014

A Guide to Marketing in 2014
Expert Insights to Help You Plan Your Digital Marketing Mix

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A Guide to Marketing in 2014

A Guide to Marketing in 2014
Expert Insights to Help You Plan Your Digital Marketing Mix
“Digital Marketing is Dead,” claimed Proctor and Gamble’s Global Brand-Building Officer Marc Pritchard this September.1
What he meant is that now is the time to work digital tools, technology and trends right into our marketing plans, instead of keeping them separate.
“Try and resist thinking about digital in terms of the tools, the platforms, the QR Codes and all of the technology coming next,” Pritchard writes. “We try and see it for what it is, which is a tool for engaging people with fresh, creative campaigns.”
This may be straightforward for a brand with the resources of P&G to declare, but for the rest of us, digital marketing is filled with choices: an array of well-hyped tools, techniques, social networks and smart glasses that may or may not deliver the return we need.
Q4 is typically budget season. You have to plan now to get the funds you need to outmanoeuver the competition. The pressure is on to make the right choices. You don’t want to have to go back to the boss, complaining you missed the next Pinterest because you weren’t up to speed. So which horses should you pick?
In 2014, we see search, social, PR, data and mobile become linked, connected and customer-centric. We’ll be able to automate certain tasks, but we’ll still need to create human connections that make our brands stand out to our customers. Here are some trends that we see:
Search providers are looking for diversity of content, in addition to the ideas of relevancy.
Email is evolving in conjunction with marketing automation and big data.
Data: we’ll have access to more of it (“big” or otherwise) than ever – is your organisation set up to take advantage with processes, products, services or offers?
Real-time marketing will come of age, and you don’t have to be Oreo, with a Superbowl “war room” of creative folks, to jump on it.
Marketing automation will allow email triggers, social media replies and sales interest follow-ups to happen with limited human intervention.
Customer experience: Can you balance automation with the effort to treat each customer as an individual who may turn any interaction with your brand into online news?
Experts and leading brands are already making these opportunities happen as we write. For this guide, we joined forces with several of them to help us explore 2014’s marketing landscape so that you can budget, plan and succeed.

1 http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/09/18/dmexco-digital-marketing-dead-proclaims-procter-gambles-global-brand-building

A Guide to Marketing in 2014

Before Starting…

“What’s the closest place near my home to buy the iPhone
5?”2 Search is trying to understand the meaning of words,

As we explore 2014’s new and growing technologies, remember that part of

rather than returning a result that has “iPhone”, “buy” and
“home”.

the way to convince management to experiment is to have a plan to mea-

The company has also made all search secure. Keywords

sure effectiveness.

will no longer be as easy to analyse related to your site. The outcome of the change is unclear at this time.

What Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs) will be affected if you start

Trend: Search Diversifies

a content marketing effort, or test out real-time messaging around a

“There are three factors for search: diversity, freshness

culture or sports event? How will you

and relevance,” says Christopher S. Penn, vice president

know if brand awareness, consideration,

of marketing technologies at Shift Communications.

inquiries or sales improved because you tried one of the tactics included in our analysis below?

“Most of what