ONLINE MARKETING IN 2012

As we make plans for 2012 budget and plans, we need to consider trends and scope in online marketing space for next year. SoMoLo (Social.Mobile.Location) will continue to gain importance. SoMoLo would be building parameters for Digital Marketing. Mobile commerce would take upward trend in 2012. Latest comScore numbers reflects 38% of people transact on their phone, that portrays the potential mobile commerce has. Also, mobile blogging is the space to watch for next year. With recent launch of wordpress for mobile and similar CMS tools, we can expect mobiles to play important role in social marketing.

Use of app for Desktops and mobiles will continue to grow in all dimensions like entertainment, finance, and mobile usability. App analytics will be another area of interest for mobile marketers. HTML5 would play a role in creating mobile app, integrating videos, and other advanced functionality in the website. With advancement in mobile technologies, advertisers will gain improved visibility and insights into campaigns, allowing them to invest more accurately in performance advertising and paid search.
Social Media - More Emphasis would be on 'consumer ratings' and customer reviews on the web space. Study from Nielsen shows that 63 percent of social media users list “consumer ratings” as their preferred source for getting information about a business, product or service. Reputation management would gain more weight as online marketing strategy in year 2012. Google algorithm will include many social signals including online reviews and ratings. With more of content being generated in web space, moderation and monitoring of web content would gain importance.

Integration of BI (Business Intelligence) with Social Analytics would continue to grow and drive the ecosystem. Focus would change from socialization to personalization. Marketers will build closer relationship with the customer with increase in data mining and more granular information.

Online video Marketing will continue to grow with more conversion potential. Cisco forecasts online video marketing will account for at least 90 percent of all Internet traffic in next three years. This means that we will be migrating from “written content” to “picture content.”
Analytics is another area to watch for in 2012. With increasing awareness and requirement among the SME‘s and businesses; use of web, mobile and app analytics would increase and improvements in the website will be driven by actionable insights from the analytics tools. Social analytics will also pick up pace from few vendors today, it will be low hanging fruits for developers considering its high potential.