Digital Marketing Predictions and recommendations for 2010

I'm always surprised by the popularity of tactical predictions for digital marketing at the start of the year. But I shouldn't be, one of the most common questions I get asked through the year 'is Dave, what's the next big thing, what's new in digital, what should I be thinking about?'

As always, I've been keeping an eye on what the specialists are saying and I have written a roundup of most useful predictions on digital marketing tactics that are close to my heart like SEO, Social marketing, Email marketing and analytics.

My own predictions aren't the run-of-the-mill predictions of innovations, rather they're about what the most savvy digital marketers get already, but others maybe don't because they're stuck in trad media thinking or it's so difficult to change the way their marketing is managed and resourced.

So here are my recommendations for 2010 structured in the key areas of digital strategy I cover in my Managing Digital Channels report for Econsultancy. If you haven't completed a review to benchmark your strategy performance, then that's a good start to the year. Try a benchmark with my Internet marketing review spreadsheet which you can download for free. It's useful to identify gaps and explain to colleagues where the focus needs to lie - it's obvious in this example.

Digital channel strategy

Managers at all levels in most companies have now bought into digital media and are resourcing it at the levels it warrants, or are at least moving in the right decision.

Recommendation 1. Develop strategic agility

Trying to build in flexibility and innovation to your digital marketing across all aspects of digital strategy is what I think needs to happen more.

If tactics like your Adwords setup, homepage or enewsletter proposition are similar month on month then this is a symptom of lack of innovation. But these are only tactics, the leaders in each sector have an adaptive approach to strategy.

One financial services company I have worked with devotes resource and emphasis to this with an Innovation Manager within many of the areas below. I realise not everyone has this much resource and investment in and changes to process are needed to enable this. Often it's easier in smaller organizations.

If you're looking to become more agile, read Don Sull of the LBS for approaches to build strategic agility.

Customer acquisition strategy

Recommendation 2. Make your acquisition communications fit product buyer behaviour better

I think many companies have a one-dimensional view of how they drive traffic to generate sales or leads via their site - it's a simple funnel of drive visitors to site and hopefully convert to generate a lead or sale.

To a big extent, this is because of limitations in the tracking tools (Google Analytics is not so strong on this) and because it's complicated.

But many visitors will not act on their first purchase, so you need to ask questions of your agency or analytics person like:

• How many visitors purchase on their first visit?
• Purchase latency - how long does it take on average before lead or sale?
• Are their different grouping of behaviour by referrer or product or customer profile?
• What is the influence of different media on each visit
• What is the evolution in search behaviour - how do brand searches evolve and are we attributing value to generic searches early in the visit:

To find out the options register for this 2009 paper on appropriate attribution of digital media channels. http://measure.coremetrics.com/corem/getform/reg/wp-appropriate-attribution

I think everyone agrees that tracking your returns from social media will be a challenge for most in 2010.

To help here, the Omniture workbook on measuring social media also provides a good plan template for tracking social media, even if you're not using Omniture.

The Omniture workbook on measuring social media also provides a good plan template for tracking social media, even if you're not using Omniture.