Track Record of Our 2014 Predictions, Part III: Marketing Trends

Here's our look at Marketing Trends:

• Thought leadership will continue to be important to B2B companies. This is going to be true for at least several years to come. Grade: A 

• Sales and marketing need to be more integrated. Perhaps this seems like a no-brainer but we’ve seen this doesn’t happen enough. Sales and marketing need to work together on direct marketing, web content, marketing automation, advertising, social marketing and PR to generate qualified leads and move them through the sales pipeline. Grade: A 

• Social media tracking services will hit it big in 2014. More measurement We probably overstated this. They’re important but there are too many different solutions measuring too many different variables. And even when they’re measuring the same variables, the algorithms generate different results that it’s hard to know what’s accurate. Grade: B

• CES is no longer the top tech convention. This is continuing a downward trend. Grade: A

• PR Spam will still be an issue. Now there’s concern that too much social media content is just repurposed press releases. We believe that’s more true than we’d like. Grade. B+

Tomorrow, we'll look at how we did based on the technology trends we predicted.