In the rapidly changing marketing landscape – where technology-enabled digital channels arise eemingly overnight – marketers are strugglig to keep up in the digital experience catch up game.
Power has all but fully shifted to the digital consumer and marketers are scrambling to redefine their roles in facilitating conversations and contributing value to consumer-brand relationships. But over the past five years sconsumer expectations have incrased on average of 20% whereas brands have kept up by only 5% – a significant gap.
This groundswell is forcing a redefintion of the orle of marketer: one that is increasingly digital and increasingly complex. Digital marketers must aggressively learn to manage new interaction channels and technologies while simulatneously honing best practice expertise in old school channels like email, search and Web.
Innovations in data management technology are rising to the task of surfacing insight from an unprecendented proliferation of digital data. Cross-departmental partnerships that embrace customer centric processes promise to deliver cohesive multichannel experineces.
Mobile
Mobile will be the center of attention in 2014 in large part because marketers are behind the eight ball. Today, more email is read on mobile clients than desktops, and by 2017, 78% of US email users are predicted ot access their emails via mobile device. In contrast, fewer than 12% of email newsletters use responsive design to optimize layouts for mobile devices. Nearly 90% of time spent on Twitter in August 2013 was on a mobile device.
Content
As organizations attempt to get their content in front of the right people, content will be treated as media. Focus will be placed on adapting core content to social, mobile, tablet, web, digital and print, delivering consistency of message and optimal ROI. Responsive digital communications that work on multiple platforms are a great start making sure that content, and not the device, is the context.
Email
94% of all online adults use email and the total number of email accounts is predicted to grow over 30% from 2.9 billion today to 3.8 billion in 2014. Email is the preferred interaction channel by consumers for commercial communications and is the heart of our online identities. Email will be at the top of all marketers’ lists who manage digital marketing on return on marketing investment (ROMI), rather than expense.
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