Advertising Trends – 7 Trends In Advertising For 2012 | Small Business Advertising Strategies

Advertising Trends – 7 Trends In Advertising For 2012

Brace yourself for the 2012 Trends In Advertising . The year 2011 had undergone some amount of changes on the digital front of advertising; Microsoft acquired Skype, Google developed its own social networking website dubbed Google+, Twitter and Facebook gained more relevancy as advertising platforms and Congress sought measures to increase disclosure by companies offering location based services.

As we head into the year 2012, we are likely to see more radical changes. Here is my list of predictions which we should look forward to in the coming year:

2012 Trends In Advertising #1: Automated Marketing

In the past, marketing automation was restricted on email and email nurturing domain. But 2011 has witnessed the expansion of social customer relationship management. We are likely to see this trend continue even further in 2012.

Rather than being viewed as an early adoption tool we are likely to see more organizations use it as a mainstream solution for connecting their marketing operations from the top, through to online search engines and finally down to the sales and customer service level.

2012 Trends In Advertising #2: All Employees are Marketers

Social networks have become the optimum solution for aggregating and sharing interests, positive or negative. This has made product or service awareness, lighting fast. This will ultimately lead to businesses becoming increasingly focused on creating and managing perception of their products or services.

This trend began in 2010, when companies began paying attention to what their customers have to say about their needs and wants through social buzz.

In 2011, this trend expanded further when companies began to respond to customer comments on digital formats. In 2012, we are likely to see companies use this medium further by creating and sharing content through its employees and evangelistic customers, to help define products, brands and services from the grass root level upwards.

2012 Trends In Advertising #3: It’s About Know More About Who I know

The need to keep with your friends’ preferences has seen a continuous rise among users on social networking sites, like Facebook. This power will be fine tuned to harness and encourage users to follow their friend’s leads or recommendations.

Personal content recommendation through Facebook stores and involved e-commerce websites will be powered and filtered by symbols of preferences such as “like”, hashtags, and +1.

2012 Trends In Advertising #4: Likes and + are Concrete Metrics

The influences of “likes” will expand beyond the online text context, it will likely have a bigger impact on the dissemination of video content. Digital content providers will design and filter their content to users based on “likes” provided by users and their friends.

Since they are in a position to determine what users are most likely to watch, digital content providers will help narrow down what they are after, saving users time and energy. In the future, we are likely to see Facebook acquire or partner with digital content providers like Hulu or Buddytv to provide a “social TV” service.

2012 Trends In Advertising #5: Social Mobile and Local

The use of mobile devices to transact in certain markets, like travel, dinning, shopping, etc will likely see an increase. According to the results found by a recent study, one-third of American adults use smartphones and that figure is poised to rise in the coming years. At the moment, click-through rates are already higher on mobile platforms than they are on desktop computers.

Location based marketing through Foursquare and similar services will like see a higher penetration rate. It is projected that 50% of last minute holiday shopping, for the year 2015 will be done via mobile devices. Therefore, marketers will have to look for ways to use this medium as the adoption of mobile devices becomes increasingly pervasive.

2012 Trends In Advertising #6: Long Live Group Discounts

Consumers have become rather price sensitive in the recent past, due to a recessive economy and dwindling incomes experienced by many consumers. This has led to the proliferation of local deal companies like Living Social, Groupon, Zulily, etc, which are likely to see an even greater following in 2012.

This rising trend has even garnered the attention of major online retails websites like Amazon.com, recognizing the value this type of services have to offer to their consumers. Daily deal offers will become increasingly local. Intelligent players employing the use of mobile markets and geo-based offers will likely become the category winners.

2012 Trends In Advertising #7: Social Networks as Search Engines

The use of social networks as a source of paid traffic will see a trickle over effect in the referral of organic search traffic. In the past year, small and business technology firms began using social networking more often in marketing their products.

In 2012, we are likely to see this trend become more dominant. For companies interested in preserving or improving their ranking on SERPs, social marketing services will no longer be an option in 2012.