Friday, February 10, 2012

Birnbach Communications' Top Predictions for 2012, Part 10

Here's our last set of predictions for 2012:


1.     Social media will play a bigger role in the marketing mix for B2B companies. More than eight years and nearly 900 million Facebook users later, B2B businesses will embrace social media, following the lead of B2C companies…though they may not focus on Facebook to reach their customers. B2B companies will recognize the need to generate their own multimedia content, and that there are active and engaged business consumers even for niche sectors. We expect that more B2B companies will consider increasing budgets to make engaging their targets through social media, thought leadership and lead generation their top marketing priorities.

2.     Reporting and metrics will continue to be important for marketing functions. For marketers, analytics will become even more important than ever. Department store owner John Wanamaker is remembered for a quote about metrics: "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I'm not sure which half." That’s not acceptable anymore. There are so many ways to measure how companies are engaging with their customers and potential customers – that one challenge is to prevent being overwhelmed by metrics and figuring out which ones truly matter to the organization. More than ever, we think clients will be asking and looking for ways to measure ROI.

Thanks for checking out all predictions. Let us know if you agree or disagree with any of them.  At the end of the year, we will issue our annual report card on how we did.

No comments: