Best Marketing Trends for 2012

The customer continues to be the king. 
Engaging customers with meaningful dialogue and relevant, timely information is very important for any business as the customer is the King.
The Data Grows. 
The amount of digital data is doubling every two years.  It is important to look at these customer interactions over time.   It is not just big technology companies that can harness the data and use it for marketing, new technologies and cloud computing have opened up all sorts of possibilities for even smaller marketers as well.
SoLoMo 
Google’s Matt Cutts coined this term.  The New York Times reported that advertisers lured customers away and stole competitor sales while they were waiting on line to make a purchase – an awesome combination of social, local and mobile all being used together.
Cloud computing and the  marketers. 
Cloud computing helps marketers by giving more accessibility to new technologies, reducing costs of marketing infrastructure (like servers and storage), easier scalability and low barriers to entry, which enables a more uniform playing field.
Email has not died. 
Spam filters and the threat of an opt-out registry haven’t dampened the growth of email.  In a recent interactive marketing forecast, Forrester predicted that email spending will continue to grow by 10% during the next several years, but marketers will focus the campaigns more using analytics.
Apps everywhere. 
The proliferation of smart phones and tablets has introduced apps on a very large scale.  It is beyond applications like Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds; people are using them for business applications.  The app Evernote to store clipped data and emails.
Attribution
Touchpoint Attribution continues to be the buzzword for multichannel marketers. Attributing success to the right channel or channels is key to effective use of marketing revenue.  In a recent study by Unica, marketers said their top two priorities are “turning data into actions” and “attributing success to marketing.”
Content marketing. 
Relevant content has always been important to drive web traffic, but blogs, case studies and white papers are now being considered an important part of the marketing mix.  Marketers will need to provide visitors to Facebook or Twitter with meaningful content to get fans to return.
Right Multichannel marketing. 
Conversations and customer interactions that are taking place in social media are being harvested by social listening platforms.  These dialogues are being turned into campaigns that drive the right offer to the right buyer at the right time.