As we settle into 2013 and what will be a BIG year in digital marketing, we’ve teamed up with our premium partners to bring you our collective take on the biggest opportunities for marketers this year. Marketing gurus from leading digital solutions share their answers to the following question:
What are the greatest challenges and/or opportunities facing digital marketers in 2013?
Ron Brien, VP Global Marketing, TagMan:
“In 2013, brands will really start to move beyond antiquated ‘Last-click’ methods of attribution when deciding which marketing channels contributed most to sales. Awarding credit solely to the ‘last-clicked’ channel provides an incomplete, skewed view by failing to account for each consumer’s unique experience of the brand across all marketing channels and stages of their purchase process. The challenge for digital marketers is finding the right tools to abandon rudimentary ‘last-click’ views of marketing effectiveness and figure out which attribution model(s) fits their business’ needs. Marketers will look towards technologies that enable them to view campaign performance on a comprehensive and holistic level, across all channels, all devices, and all events.”
Glenn Cross, Vice President of Marketing, ForeSee:
“Today’s customers are both multi-channel and multi-device users, which creates a unique circumstance that is both the challenge and the opportunity for digital marketers.
The challenge is that the modern consumer can shop and engage with a company anywhere at any time through any channel and on any device. And, if any of those experiences fail in the eyes of the consumer, companies run the risk of losing current and potential customers. With low to no switching costs involved, customers can and will go to where the experience meets their expectations.
However, the opportunity to create loyal customers that are more likely to purchase, return, and recommend IS there. It comes down to business leaders using a sound methodology to listen to THEIR customers’ wants and needs. Only then will they have the business intelligence to make the right strategic, tactical, and operation decisions that will drive their business forward.”
Jon Myers, Commercial Director – EMEA, Marin Software:
“2013 is the year when big data gets turned into big actions
The rate of change and evolution in this industry doesn’t look like slowing down in 2013, and as always that will be the biggest challenge. However, the challenge specific to 2013 for marketers will be how they turn all the “Big Data” they sit on into actions to optimise revenue. Marketers sit on more data than ever before across multiple online and offline channels, and this year they will look to find solutions to how they can turn this data into actions which optimise revenue outcomes in a scalable way.
The biggest opportunity remains in mobile in 2013. Nearly 25% of search clicks are now coming from mobile devices, and as mobile and tablet penetration increases, this will only increase alongside it. The advertisers who succeed will be the advertisers who effectively adjust their marketing programs to deal with this new multi-device world. It will be particularly interesting to observe how bricks and clicks retailers integrate mobile into their high street shopping experience in light of what’s happened to Comet, Jessops and HMV recently.”
Ben Plomion, VP Marketing & Partnerships, Chango:
“2013 is the year of programmatic
Real-time bidding is poised to reach as much as 50% of display spend in certain verticals such as finance and CPG. Retailers are making a smarter use of behavioral and CRM data to customize their products page. Businesses to business companies are quickly adopting lead nurturing system. Whatever industry we look at, there’s a general appreciation that 2013 will be a year where CMOs will wrest control of their first party data to deliver the right message to the right user at the right time.
Retargeting is no different. We are seeing more CMOs understand the value of serving display ads to customers, based on either their browsing history (Site Retargeting) or search history (Search Retargeting). In addition, CMOs now have the ability to serve ads on Facebook based on user’s search history on Google, Yahoo! And Bing.
Tag management companies such as TagMan are a key component of the programmatic ecosystem. By allowing CMOs to manage their tags effectively, TagMan makes it easier for CMOs to gain full transparency into retargeting campaign results.”
Barney Larkin, Marketing Manager, FusePump:
“2013 is going to be an exciting year for digital marketers and e-commerce in general. There is the challenge of managing increasingly large and complex data sets relating to consumer purchasing behaviours. There are plenty of decisions that will have to be made around sales attribution and how different channels and devices relate to one another and ultimately to the sales funnel. Companies that manage this well will unlock some superb insight that will, in turn, allow them to get closer to their customers and personalise their product content in more creative ways than ever before. There are also incredible opportunities that international e-commerce now has to offer even the smallest of merchants. With global delivery now a reality, the focus is on ensuring that your products are visible and accurately and consistently represented in whatever channel a consumer chooses to engage with you in. Exciting times in e-commerce!”
Chris Sheen, Head of Marketing, SaleCycle:
“2013 is the year to think simple.
With plenty of attention on emerging channels and technologies, top brands will focus on the basics which get lost in the pressure to innovate:
1. Don’t make me think: Get that checkout process optimized and make it easy for customers to purchase by keeping it simple, offering clear and concise actions and plenty of payment options.
2. There’s always some who slip through the net: Make sure you’re doing everything to recover sales that might get away due to increasingly high abandonment rates – basket abandonment emails for example (we do a pretty good job by the way…)
3. Creative is King: With so many high-resolution devices, whether it’s smart phones or tablets, and a plethora of photo sharing apps like Pinterest and Instagram, our consumers are becoming a little more demanding when it comes to digital design. Don’t scrimp when it comes to top-drawer photography and product imagery.”
Brian Stone, VP of Marketing, Causata:
“Digital Marketers will be challenged with the Customer Data Prison in 2013
Digital Marketers are now challenged with gaining insight from many customer data warehouses, which include the web, email, social, CRM and even mobile. As the amount of customer data is continuously growing, customer journeys and paths are now often scattered across these different databases – creating data prisons. Taking this customer information, analyzing it and developing actionable insights can very challenging, along with getting measureable results and immediate ROI on past customer behavior.
With TagMan’s partnership, Causata’s predictive analytics and real-time decisioning applications enable B2C companies to create meaningful experiences through data. Our industry-specific applications for cross-sell, loyalty, and retention can drive email and mobile campaigns, personalize web and social experiences, and create context-driven sales and services.”
Scott Meyer, CEO, Evidon:
“Within interactive media circles in recent years, the greatest challenges mostly have pertained to fragmentation, which makes buying – and can make selling – far more complex than need be. Today, perhaps in response to fragmentation, the move to streamline audience buying and measurement has enabled the so-called “programmatic” segment to grow dramatically.
The programmatic segment, which has given us acronyms like RTB, SSP, DSP, and others, brings tremendous value to the market. But it brings challenges as well, specifically, when a number of the tracking elements that enable these technologies go unseen by businesses and consumers. Unknown and/or excess tracking code can slow sites down; microsecond latency on a major e-tail site could cost that site’s owner millions of dollars over the course of a year. Unseen trackers can also make a site’s data vulnerable and its advertising less valuable, not to mention compromise consumer privacy.
Brands and other digital ad businesses clearly need to focus on revealing this invisible web, so they can capitalize on innovation instead of being inadvertently damaged by it.”
