Predictions for Future Digital Marketing till 2016 – Search to Decline

Forrester Research has released its latest projects for the growth of the interactive marketing industry through 2016. According to the report, $77 billion per year will be spent on digital marketing activities by 2016 which is almost equivalent to the advertising budget spent on TV ads as of today. Some of the key points include:

• The growing usage of interactive marketing tactics into the main marketing strategies are a clear indication that digital campaigns will become more strategic and important aspect of integrated marketing communications.
• Online search will lose its share, but will still continue to grow up to $33 billion / year channel by that time.
• Display, mobile and social will all have an increased share. Though, social will lag behind the other channels due to the fact that social campaigns are less costly in terms of execution.

With the growing popularity of digital channels and mediums, it is clear that the digital marketing industry will continue to boom. But it is not the traditional digital marketing that will mark the future strategies, but multichannel digital communications is what will form the base of future marketing. Search will still retain the top stop, but the nature and behavior of search will change. Future search will require more interactivity and a better understanding to be part of an integrated marketing plan.

There are many observations that have led to derive this conclusion:

• Online consumers are smarter and empowered with more research tools today than ever before.
• Web has changed. Consumers are now relying on social networks, online reviews, videos, apps and other platforms to make an informed decision.
• Smart and better analytics tools have allowed to perform a true evaluation of the online campaign performance.

Unlike the earlier times when the marketers were not able to calculate the performance of their online spend, now real time calculation of the ROI is also possible. Thus, it is highly probable that every marketer will move toward digital marketing strategies more.

One channel alone will not help the marketers. A multi channel presence is required to convince today’s smart audience. The challenge now is to integrate and optimize all the channels.
But the marketers need not panic. Google Analytics has introduced their Multi Channel Funnel. They are intended to provide the marketers with full range of influences that lead to a conversion.s that lead to conversion.

According to Google:

“When a customer buys or converts on your site, most conversion tracking tools credit the most recent link or ad clicked. In reality though, customers research, compare and make purchase decisions via multiple touch points across multiple channels. So marketers that measure return solely on the last channel that a customer touches before conversion are getting an incomplete picture, and potentially missing out on important opportunities to reach their customers.”

Though such insights are not new, but this is one of the easiest and a free tool that even the beginner in analytics can use.

The key advice to a digital marketer is to come up with unique ideas that are more interactive and can be integrated easily across several channels.