Marketing Tips For 2013 From 25 Marketing Experts [Infographic]

In the last few days, I have covered online marketing several times. It’s been everything from social media marketing to email marketing design and the trends should be quite clear by now. You’re probably asking yourself what we haven’t covered yet, right? Well, we haven’t touched on what the marketing experts themselves think about the trends within online marketing for 2013. It would be pointless for me to sit here and try to sum up what they have said in a couple of paragraphs or less. What I will do instead is go in-depth about a few of their opinions to see if we can make some sense about what they are suggesting. But before I do that, we should always remember that creativity wins the game, no matter what any marketing expert says.

Jay Baer makes an interesting note about social media and how proactive and progressive marketing through these channels will entirely come to an abrupt stop. As he says it, customers will become more curious but also more suspicious which will force marketers to shift their approach from marketing to helping instead. This means that we’re pretty much back to square one.

When I was first introduced to Twitter, I saw people helping each other by sharing interesting and useful content. People weren’t selling anything, they just tried to help, and by doing so, they gained a few sales and pageviews here and there. Since then, social media has become a strategic war zone where marketing experts do their very best to break through the noise with clever and creative marketing campaigns. What marketing experts like Jay now suggest is that we’ll be going back to what it used to be, which makes perfect sense since that is somewhat what the core of social media is all about – to connect and help each other out.

If we look at email marketing, which I covered yesterday, it seems marketing experts like Kristina Huffman and I are on the same page. Email marketing will become more versatile, and more options will be given to marketers. But there will also be more work to be done before a solid email marketing campaign has been completely tailored for success.

Kristina continuous to suggest that marketing emails will have to be more customized to each subscriber. That’s something that I think is right on target with the progress we’re seeing on the technology market. More mobile devices means more work for the marketing experts before any positive results can be derived and harnessed from their email marketing campaign. But when the results are finally collected, it could potentially be a lot more positive than what we saw back in 2012.

Marketing expert Mathew Sweezey delivers his expert advice about marketing automation, which suggests 2013 is going to be a huge year. With all the user statistics available today, there is no reason why automated marketing shouldn’t be approached. Some people might hold a grudge against it, while others welcome it. I understand both viewpoints, but I believe there is a middle ground that could appeal to both of these camps.

Marketing automation doesn’t have to be the usual email spam that we all hate, quite the contrary. We’re talking about carefully designed online marketing campaigns that listen to what you, as an online social media user, like and find appealing. Compare it to what Google is doing with ads. The way Google collects information about you as an Internet browser enables them to tailor the ads according to the things you like. Automated marketing campaigns created by marketing experts would most likely work the same way.

If all cogs are used the way they are supposed to, marketing automation could even regress and decrease the marketing spam that litters our inboxes. Spammers wouldn’t be able to match the return on investment when it comes to legit marketing automation, which in turn would mean more and more spammers would have to convert their efforts to a legit one. We are of course a long way from that, but we’re seeing the dawn of that vision right now.

This list of marketing experts’ tips and predictions for 2013 is compiled by ExactTarget, and it is an extensive, and by all means, great guide to what marketing will most likely look like in 2013. Have a glance through it and prepare yourself for the revolution that is suggested by these experts. It will be an exciting year with lots of creative opportunities, that’s for sure!

ExactTarget’s Marketing Experts’ 2013 Predictions

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