According to new research from Experian Hitwise, the essence of marketing in 2013 will cover four aspects of the digital: search, social, mobile and e-mail, all of them united by the dominance of personalised content.
These are trends that are going to affect digital marketing as a whole and brands should take them into account when planning their marketing campaigns this year, Experian says. Here is an overview of how they will evolve over the next few months.
Search engines are slowly but surely changing their status from navigational portals to content portals. As more and more information is included and displayed on a search results page, users are actually encouraged to stay on the page, while in the past search results were seen just as a mere navigational tool to direct users to a website. As search engines become better at providing highly personalised results, Experian believes that their prominence will continue to grow.
Social is set to evolve in 2013, as businesses start to employ more straightforward tools for measuring their performance on social networks, gaining a better understanding of how they work and what their impact on business is. The development of mature social marketers will lead to the creation of improved social media campaigns, the report predicts.
The advancement of mobile is closely related to the evolution of search and social. More users are depending on their mobile devices to access the web and this will boost mobile optimisation for company websites. Consumers will be looking for websites that allow easy mobile navigation, which means that sites without a mobile-friendly interface will lose ground.
Data and real-time content will shape the future for e-mail. Marketing messages will have to be individually tailored to boost engagement. The ability to update and change e-mail content once it has been sent will also become an increasingly important trend in 2013, Experian says.