4 Vital Digital Marketing Trends (or Developments) for 2012
Keeping an eye on what the future holds in its palm is key to growing your business and reaching out to new audiences. Trends will continue to 
change directions. And if you aren’t ready to embrace the upcoming developments, you can easily lose the race. As we proceed into 2012, it’s highly essential that you become cognizant of the top digital marketing trends.
Given below are four key trends that you’ll need to watch in 2012, so that you can make your digital marketing efforts fruitful and elevate your business to new heights.
#1. Location, Location, Location!
Location-based marketing (LBM) is one of the top trends in the digital marketing arena, as the year 2012 continues to unfold. Focusing on delivering content (instantly usable information) to the user should always remain a high priority, if you’re really serious about generating more leads as well as staying ahead of the competition. With the ever-increasing population of mobile device users, delivering content to consumers based on their location becomes even more important.
The biggest benefit of location-specific marketing is that you can immediately increase the rate of conversion for your business. To improve your location-based marketing, you can follow these tips.
Buy country-specific domain names (.co.uk for UK, .com.au for Australia etc)
Create a mobile-friendly version of your website
Use Facebook ads to target audience by demographics, interests etc
Master the usage of free tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc
Use services like foursquare and Gowalla to engage consumers
Don’t forget to claim your Google Places page (Google Places Optimization)
#2. Video Advertising Leads the Way
According to a recent report by emarketer, online video advertising spend in the US will cross the $3 billion mark in 2012. Online video marketing is an emerging trend due to two major reasons – better reach and better measurement. Since more than 1.3 billion videos are watched in the US per day, video advertising happens to be a rich medium to establish an emotional connection with consumers, engage them quickly and achieve a higher conversion.
#3. Gamification Drives Social Momentum
Yes, it’s not just the latest fad. Though adopting this marketing approach depends on the kind of business you run, gamification can present some of the most potential opportunities you wouldn’t want to miss. To get started with it, you should first of all get the concept pretty clear in your mind. Gamification is not entirely similar to games. In fact, the concept that underlies the term is the application of gaming principles to non-game experiences in an effort to drive social momentum among the audiences. Several brands have gamified their marketing strategies to engage customers (by offering incentives) and provoke them to take action. Start-ups can benefit from this concept the most.
#4. Privacy Concerns are Growing
User privacy is another burning issue that digital marketers should pay careful attention to. Today, consumers are more vigilant about the usage of their personal data by businesses. Whether you’re an advertising agency, a retailer, a trader or an OS creator, you can never keep consumers in the dark about how you’re going to handle their personal data. The more knowledge and control (over personal data) you provide, the more trust you can gain from users.
There are many more trends that you’ll need to watch out for, to bolster your digital marketing strategy further. What’s really important, however, is that you don’t get distracted while getting the basics right.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions on other upcoming trends in digital marketing. The comment section is all yours.
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Mobile web services are becoming more popular. Many of us using the web services through mobile browser. So mobile marketing is on current and continuous to be on upcoming trends too.
Definitely, mobile usage is rapidly increasing across a wide range of categories, social networking having the largest share currently. We definitely need to keep a close watch on the upcoming trends!
Thanks for your comment, Tessa.
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Obaidul Haque recently posted..How to Build a Linkbait Campaign That Delivers Results
Good Article. In 2012 my SEO goals will be, good quality content to generate social sharing and a link-building only with good quality PR sites, location identification by google for a business, and mobil
Pedro Pereira recently posted..Dados sobre a Publicidade Online – Google Adwords
People are getting better and better in searching more specifically today what they’re looking for than what they were 3-4 years ago. They want to get the right result directly so it is important that the titles, keywords, try to specify exactly what we write about on blogs and websites.
Of course, Marbella. We should never forget to get the basics of SEO right.
Thanks for your comment.
In the past, I tried gamifying my pizza website by using a company called Big Door. I’m sure if I grasped the concept totally, I would have not better results, but any results. I’ve even seen how Google has tried to gamify certain aspects of their brand, but I had never participated.
I may try to go back with some bit of gamifying my site, but not until I can do it properly.
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Brian recently posted..Pizza Recipes
Definitely, gamification can apply to a website or blog in so many ways. It’s a wonderful concept that a business or brand can use to quickly engage the audiences.
I’ll definitely have a look at your pizza website to check out how you use this concept.
Thanks for comment, Brain.
Mobile advertising is going to get better and more important. Local seo optimisation is going to play a big part in 2012 and taking advantage of services such as Yelp and Foursquare will pay off.
[...] This is a burning issue for all high profile web firms, and the user. Today’s users are highly concerned about how their personal data will be handled. In fact, ‘user privacy concern’ is one of the emerging digital trends in 2012. [...]