10 Marketing Predictions for 2010

FastCompany.com – Excerpts from a December 23, 2009 Blog by FC Expert Blogger David Lavenda

1. Increased competition in a tight market, coupled with the signs of an economic recovery, will prompt companies to invest more in marketing; but companies will want better metrics for how dollars are being spent to contribute to the bottom line.
2. As the number of smart phones balloons (Gartner predicts 1.2 billion smart phones will be in the field by the end of 2010), the mobile channel will become a critical one for marketers.
3. Social marketing progresses on the hype cycle. Marketers will realize that social marketing is not free, and it is not a panacea for reduced budgets.
4. Email is far and away the most popular marketing channel and it will continue to be so as Forrester Research predicts email marketing to grow by 11% CAGR over the next four years to reach a $2B market by 2014. Savvy marketers will be increasingly challenged to find ways to “cut through the noise” and not be filtered out, either automatically by SPAM filters or manually, by the dreaded DELETE button.
5. Marketers’ attempts to reach consumers via popular social tools like Facebook and Twitter will improve and will become less obtrusive.
6. A new social tool or application will become the darling of 2010. Just like Facebook and Twitter before it, a new social tool will capture the attention of those always looking for the next thing...standby!
7. It will become easier to create mobile and social applications that run on multiple platforms without having to create one dedicated app for each one.
8. The use of virtual meetings and webinars will expand. During the current downturn, companies have learned how to effectively use virtual meetings to reduce travel costs and improve efficiency.
9. As the number of marketing channels increases to include social and mobile applications, the need to measure responses and understand the contribution of each channel to the marketing mix will become critical.
10. Tools to measure marketing activities will continue to improve, and new ones will appear on the market. Interbrand expects this to be a $1B market. With the availability of these new tools, marketers will be able to better analyze (and therefore justify) their marketing budgets, based on meaningful metrics.