Digital marketing has been bigger than ever before in 2012. With traditional mediums like television, newspapers, and magazine all transitioning to smaller, mobile-friendly formats, marketers are constantly adapting so their ads can be found where their customers are consuming media. eMarketer recently outlined 4 key trends of the year of which marketers should take note.
"The accelerating pace of technology adoption, consumer behavior, and content availability has formed a virtuous cycle." Consumers are shifting towards smaller, smarter devices. Tablets and e-reader adoption continues to grow at a sharp rate, and smartphone penetration has surpassed 50% in the United States. Not only do advertisers need to understand and establish a presence on these devices, they need to ensure that campaigns are seamless across platforms.
"Magnetic content represents a departure from the classic interruption model of advertising." Instead of bold advertising tactics which distract and intrude, marketers are finding success with tactics that attract and engage consumers. Marketers are attempting to blur the line between content and advertising with creative tactics like seeding videos on viral channels like Facebook, or creating custom branded games, apps, or user-generated content promotions.
"Let's go to the video ad." Video ads, along with rich media, are the most popular formats for ad buyers by a significant margin. Forrester Research found that the video ad format is only outpaced in growth by text-based display ads, but video spend is expected to overtake that of text ads by 2014. Video ads tend to be more engaging and effective than static banners, and can often be easily viewed across all devices a consumer may be using.
"The revolution will be televised, streamed, shared, tweeted, linked, posted, blogged, aggregated, curated, scanned... and measured." Measurement is key to jugging the performance of any ad campaign. The wide variety of platforms available today do not share a standard set of metrics with which to prove ROI. Campaigns across platforms may all have different goals and KPIs as well. eMarketer notes, "The common thread is that measurement is becoming increasingly important as digital marketing budgets increase relative to overall marketing dollars. With a growing variety of data inputs to consider from sources such as social media, browsing histories, transactional behavior, demographics, geographic location, and more, companies are under growing pressure to show that this material positively impacts the bottom line."
For more on top trends this year from the study, check out a SlideShare summary or download the study from eMarketer.