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Marketing trends for 2011

The concept is no longer new but is still what any advertiser must face. The most difficult part about digital marketing is how to thrive in the digital arena. How to use the right channel at the right time with the right performance and achieve the right result? To develop a clear map for integrated digital planning, it is important to know the competitive advantages and opportunities of each digital solution.

The upcoming digital trends for 2011 are social marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing, accountability, and integration on which all advertisers, agencies and media owners will be focused.

Microblogging is rapidly getting more and more popular in China. The numbers of microblog users at the end of 2010 (more than 50million) made the microblogs role move from “new media” to “hot media” making the competition harder and harder between Sina, Netease, Sohu and Tencent. The key for the success of microblogging is to lure the maximum number of users finding the best bait like Kai-Fu Lee, the founding President of Google China.

Once everybody joined, content marketing should be the center of attention for all advertisers. This can be divided into 2 kinds: Sponsoring (exposure through big events), and Product Placement (displaying brands into movies, TV shows…). Content has to be interesting enough to make people think “It would be nice if I had that”.

Mobile Marketing is the real upcoming way of advertising for this year. The biggest challenge is definitely to be able to follow the fast upgrading of new technologies. Local-based service (LBS) and augmented reality (AR) are the latest trends for marketers. Another facet of mobile marketing to take into account is the growing numbers of Smartphone users (iPhone; Android). This raises several questions about mobile marketing. The dilemma of making apps, how to manage and update content, use of LBS, method to make AR fancier and response to a personal and highly-customized media.

How can we measure Internet advertising efficiency? Miniblog popularity is not only determined by the number of users. Are SOV and GRP applicable to Internet advertising? What is more important between interactivity and number? These are the challenging questions for accountability in 2011.

Many companies like CBN Weekly, The Bund or Modern Weekly already have their iPad website version, so shall we adapt advertising being digital or stay traditional? Combination is easy but the problem is still how to deliver innovative ideas based on the technologies control the results.