The start of each year typically sees marketers ticking off a long list of resolutions for the 365 days to come: Pitch this product more effectively, optimize that email campaign, drive leads faster, get more social, lower costs, become more efficient and dozens of others. All noble goals. But in the year ahead, savvy businesses will shift their emphasis off of themselves and onto their customers and prospects, acknowledging a trend that’s cresting right now: customers, empowered by Web and social tools, have more control over the brand than ever.

Think of 2013, then, as the year of the customer. Your objective? Writing the next chapter in your company’s illustrious marketing history by moving away from batch and blast initiatives to delivering hyper-personalized campaign interactions to segments of one. Our mission? Helping you get there with strategies, tactics, videos and worksheets aimed at educating and empowering you to tackle the six biggest digital marketing trends in 2013 and giving you a leg up on the competition.

Marketing in 2013: The State of the Union

Why the shift to a customer- and prospect-centric model in 2013? Buyers, fed up with crowded inboxes and irrelevant advertising noise, are shutting out content that isn’t relevant to them and using search and social to control their own buyer journeys. In this landscape, relying too heavily on generic communications or even segmentation-based marketing isn’t going to cut it. Now more than ever, you need to understand the person that’s on your website, visiting your social page, clicking through your emails, downloading your custom Web tools, checking in at your stores, and much more.

That’s why savvy marketers are ratcheting up the collection of data and looking more and more to customer and prospect actions to guide how they communicate with each individual person in their database – across channels and in real time. Take email, for example. It’s still the No. 1 marketing channel in terms of ROI, but it no longer has to be in a silo. Behavioral marketing automation – the combination of customer behaviors and automation – is transforming the channel. With the right tools and know-how, you can now use Web visits, social interactions, purchase history and countless other behaviors to guide the timing of the emails you send. And you can build in behavior-driven dynamic content to impact the messaging within each email. It’s just one of many channels that’s transitioning from a relatively static medium to a behavior-driven dynamo.

It’s no wonder, then, that marketers cite the need to personalize messages based on consumer behavior across channels as their biggest campaign management challenge during the next two years. The C-suite has awoken to the value and potency of one-to-one content as well, with nearly 90 percent of business leaders saying getting closer to their customers is their top priority for realizing their strategy over the next five years. Accordingly, the most proactive CMOs are tapping new digital data sources to discover what customers and prospects want. That means more automation, more behavior-triggered content, and more customized websites and social sites.

So, are you ready to move away from communicating with segments of thousands, and move toward conversing with thousands of segment of one? To help you nail the transition, we present six key digital marketing trends for 2013.

Big data moves from the aggregate to the individual and starts to become actionable for smaller companies.

Big data. It’s quite the buzz right now, and with good reason. With all the social chatter related to brands across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, massive new customer and prospect data streams are being created by the second. But in many ways, the concept of “big data” isn’t new – it’s just evolving.

For decades the biggest companies have built data warehouses, had scientists study the data, and used predictive modeling to make high-level decisions about the brand. The approach, while immensely valuable to huge corporations, also has limitations:

• It’s expensive and slow, typically taking months at a time
• Companies must find places to store the data and figure out how they’re going to process it
• It’s traditionally been anonymous and aggregate, rather than connected to individuals
• It’s fragmented (one warehouse for social, one for Web analytics, etc.), so it’s not easily actionable

But what if you could take traditional notions of “big data,” break down the silos, tie data to individuals, and connect it to a digital marketing automation platform that enabled you to act on this data? And then, conversely, use this individual data to flavor the way you look at aggregate data questions and predictive analytics? That’s the new vision of “big data,” which doesn’t always involve a scientific analysis team but can still drive massive increases in engagement, conversions and revenue.

The good news is that in 2013 big data storage costs will decrease, as will the time to process and analyze this data. What to do with the data and insights, though, will become a larger problem. The old way was to spend a month getting a massive data set from months ago into a data system, have your scientists crunch it, and then get a report back that tells you how to approach different segments. But this doesn’t necessarily help with connecting on an individual level.

Can you use the data you’re amassing to be relevant on your website, in real time, when the visitor shows up and is ready to make a buying decision? This is a key question marketers must ask and act on in 2013.

Admittedly, thinking about the mountains of data across so many channels can be overwhelming. The key is to not let the data paralyze you but rather be empowered by it, implementing a continuous improvement initiative in which you use the data to capture insights that enable you to improve and take action on that data.

Fortunately, this is no longer in the “too hard” pile. With the recent advancements in marketing automation platforms, the time is now to link up your data between Web, CRM, relational tables, email and beyond. (For more on the unified marketing platform, see p. 8.)

For many, the “big data” holy grail is to capture social interactions and take automated actions based on these social behaviors, and in 2013 we’ll start to see companies marrying social data with core marketing solutions. But even while the technology is catching up to the social explosion, there’s still plenty you can do with “big data.” Think about the different ways you could take all the information you have about your customers at the individual level, boil it up in a semi-unstructured way, and begin to use it to either prove or disprove different hypotheses that you might make about your customers, when they buy and why they react in the ways they do.

The possibilities are endless, so get started today with the data you’re currently collecting, taking it one bite at a time and integrating and appending other relational data sources, capturing more and more behaviors. By doing so, you’ll be building a strong foundation for using the “new” big data to the fullest.

Companies increasingly invest in unified marketing platforms centered on customer behaviors and automation.

Given that today’s empowered buyers can pretty much get any piece of information they want, at the exact moment they want and on the device of their choice, businesses are recognizing the need to enhance the buyer experience by delivering relevant content when and where their customers and prospects are.

Just think, if you can capture each of your customers’ unique interests and speak to them as individuals instead of shouting the same message to everyone, then communication channels should actually get quieter – less email, less ads, less junk. What’s left? Highly relevant, hotly anticipated content that people welcome.

The problem for most marketers is that they can’t deliver individualized content to segments of one unless all customer touch points are shared in a centralized database that’s tied to a robust marketing automation platform. And that’s where the unified behavioral marketing database comes into play.

In 2013, leading companies will move away from a listbased marketing approach to a constantly evolving “persistent database” married to behaviors across multiple channels, providing an all-encompassing view of customers and prospects.

Think of this focus on listening to customer actions as the rise of the “invisible” preference center, in which you pull implicit data (based on your prospects’ and customers’ behaviors) in addition to the explicit data you (should) gather from them via progressive Web forms, surveys and traditional preference centers. For marketers, the benefits of investing in a unified marketing platform centered on customer behaviors and automation are profound.

Content marketing becomes even more critical as buyers demand more personalized, uniquely relevant content

Between search engines, social networks and peer reviews, there’s a wealth of content available to customers and prospects who are trying to make buying decisions. The result is that in both the B2B and B2C worlds, buyers are typically much further down the buyer cycle by the time they begin interacting with businesses directly – one study showed that a customer’s first serious engagement with a company rep typically occurs when the customer is already 57 percent through the purchase process.

Translation? You have to find ways to provide educational content during these earlier stages, so when buyers are ready to make a purchase – whether it’s a 55-inch TV for their living room or a high-end software package for their company — you’ve been guiding them all along. This means paying more attention to creating content across the entire buying (life)cycle, providing a seamless dialogue from first touch to initial sale to loyal advocate.

To drive conversions, encourage social sharing and foster a community of brand advocates, your content needs to be more educational and engaging. The key is to be personally relevant, using dynamic content or behaviordriven programs to deliver content that aligns with the recipient’s preferences, industry or buying cycle stage, whether they’re “interested,” “engaged,” “inactive” or “post-purchase.”

For example, let’s say a visitor to your site has just signed up for your newsletter. You might send that contact a welcome message with a dynamic content block(s) that populates differently depending on whether the person:

• Has never made a purchase: Content block populates with list of top 5 most popular items and a discount incentive
• Just made a purchase in conjunction with opting in to your newsletter: Photos of related accessories and a link to a how-to video
• Made a purchase a few months ago: Updated info on your product range, plus invite to follow your company on Twitter

In this example, the purchase behavior drives the content. But you could also establish rule sets based on what pages the subscriber had visited on your site, whether the person had liked you on Facebook,if he or she had ever checked in at one of your retail stores, and much more.

The possibilities are endless. Imagine a prospect has dropped by your booth and left his business card, scanned one of your QR codes or entered his info on an iPad. You could send an automated follow-up email later that day with different content depending on whether the prospect was a first-time contact or had previously downloaded content. The first-timer might get a message referencing the features he showed an interest in along with collateral that helps position you within the market. The previous downloader could receive an invite to a Webinar related to the content he had downloaded.

In many cases, you can increase engagement even more by combining behavioral data with scoring systems to help determine which content to deliver – in real time. By building rule sets that trigger message delivery when someone takes an action that pushes him or her past a certain score threshold, you’ll boost relevancy by serving up content on the recipient’s timetable rather than the company’s.

If you want to meet customer and prospect needs by providing a better balance of promotional email and behavior-driven messages, make it a New Year’s resolution to take a careful look at what content you can offer across channels and stages in the buying cycle. For companies that ratchet up their focus on content marketing in 2013, the outcome will be more personalized content across Web, email and social – and happier customers as a result.

Customers expect a mobile-friendly experience.

There are nearly 120 million smart phones now in the United States alone, and email is the top activity on both smartphones and tablets – with shopping close behind. As the popularity of these mobile devices continues to rise, customers will increasingly expect your content to be delivered in a mobile-friendly fashion.

If you’ve been slow to adjust to the mobile customer, you’re running a real risk in 2013 of providing an experience that’s so poor that the customer goes somewhere else – perhaps never to return again. Think of not going mobile as akin to not being in the phone book a few decades ago or, more recently, not showing up in search – if you’re not there, you’re out of the game.

The time is now, then, to rethink design and streamline conversion activity, delivering a seamless experience as customers and prospects connect with your brand from multiple devices. This requires not just designing for screen size, but also designing for the mobile context. Today, people are reading your content while waiting at stoplights in their cars, as they’re watching sports on TV and while they’re walking from the parking lot to the office building. As a result, your content may need to be bigger, shorter and simpler, and pop more. If you’re not already, in 2013 you should be:

• Making your emails and website scannable: You want the reader to get the gist in the first screen without having to scroll down two or three screens to find your call to action or key content.
• Designing for the tap instead of the click: The fingertip is the new mouse — more portable but less accurate. So, you have to give it more room. Larger font size and bigger CTA buttons facilitate this, but you also have to avoid other potential hazards, such as scrunched-up lists of tappable links.
• Making call-to-action buttons more prominent: Along with larger type, this makes your CTA stand out and also increases tapping accuracy. Using a “bulletproof” button that renders even if images don’t will increase your tap potential.
• Streamlining your conversion activity: Has your previous strategy involved packing as many conversion opportunities as possible into an email or Web page? If so, consider focusing on a single conversion where applicable – this may drive better results for mobile viewers with limited time to sort through your options.

As you work toward these goals, pay careful attention to landing pages that will typically be navigated to from mobile phones. If users are clicking on a QR code or participating in a check-in program, you don’t want to deliver them content that displays awkwardly on a mobile device.

Of course, at many companies these different channels are created by different departments, presenting challenges for businesses looking to build a positive mobile experience cross-channel. As a result, savvy companies may want to re-examine their content design process as they move into 2013.

Would you benefit from a process change in which email, Web and social groups got together more frequently to discuss mobile strategy? Are your designers and coders building visual elements with the mobile experience in mind? And how might you shift to a responsive Web design approach? With the number of U.S. smartphone users projected to reach nearly 200 million by 2016 and the number of U.S. tablet users expected to leap to 133 million in 2015, you should be asking all these questions and more as you enter the new year.

The social conversation impacts every channel, from search to Web to email and beyond.

Social media has been building in impact, with the “big 3” of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn topping 1 billion, 500 million and 175 million users, respectively. Toss in emerging players such as Google+, Pinterest, Foursquare and others, and it’s easy to see why marketers will be paying more attention to social than ever in 2013.

More and more, though, the way savvy companies look at social is changing. Rather than just another channel to publish promotional content, social is becoming about the unique interaction and engagement that can take place there. So it’s not so much about a specific social network as about connecting conversations, people and important ideas across all your digital assets to create momentum. Think of social in 2013 as not just an extra channel, but as a medium that’s woven into every channel:

Similarly, if new visitors are coming to your site via their friends’ or business associates’ Tweets, likes, pins, etc., lengthy forms and stiff language can be an immediate turnoff. Look for more companies to use progressive forms and social login (see the “Data” bullet at right) to create a more social experience on their website and landing pages.

Search: More and more buyers are starting their decision-making process via online research and talking to other users, and search engines are increasingly playing favorites with social content, video, Facebook, Twitter, etc. As a result, savvy marketers will be applying SEO-like strategies to social channels and content. The names you use for your social profile when you’re making a Facebook page or creating tabs within social sites impact your search rank and should be given the same SEO attention as your website.

Marketers looking to enhance their social search strategy will also be looking carefully at ways to drive social sharing. More and more, search engine algorithms are factoring in the number of social shares, meaning that the number of Twitter followers you have – and the percentage that retweet your content – could play a key role in determining your ultimate search rank. So not only does your page need to be SEO-friendly, it also needs to get “social love” to boost it up in search results.

Websites: Less corporate-speak and more peer recommendations will be the trend in 2013 as websites become more socially enabled. For example, if you have a list of white papers on your site, you might highlight those that are most popular, reveal how often they’ve been downloaded and share what percentage of readers gave each document a thumbsup. Not only does this incorporate customer voices into your site, but it also saves visitors valuable time. And by adding social elements to your site, you’ll make it feel like it’s part of a bigger ecosystem and not just the monolithic face of your company.

Similarly, if new visitors are coming to your site via their friends’ or business associates’ Tweets, likes, pins, etc., lengthy forms and stiff language can be an immediate turnoff. Look for more companies to use progressive forms and social login (see the “Data” bullet at right) to create a more social experience on their website and landing pages.

Email: If social is about the conversation, email is about the conversion. Coordinate the two so they’re working together, and you can maximize revenue. In 2013, then, the most successful marketers will incorporate a more human voice into their emails – less stilted language and more employee voices — and increase the use of social and peer content within messages. This can be especially effective when combined with dynamic content. For example, you could serve up a product or Webinar recommendation based on a recipient’s behaviors and toss in some customer reviews of that product or Webinar for good measure.

Mobile check-ins: With the number of Foursquare users topping 30 million, and many of these people sharing their check-ins via Twitter, socially aware companies will increasingly use automated (or manual) responses to Tweeted check-ins to add touch points

Content: More marketers are going to look closely at giving away content for free (or for less than they have in the past) in an effort to increase social sharing. In addition, savvy marketers should be constantly looking for ways to make social sharing easier, such as including social-sharing links within PDFs (complete with built-in Tweets) and designing campaigns built around sharing content.

Data: 2013 will be the year social sign-in becomes more widespread. On the customer/prospect side, the ease of entry will make it a preferred option, especially as people become more accustomed to using their social login as an alternate to filling out long registration or download forms. From a business point of view, marketers interested in gathering info for campaigns that might be challenging to get otherwise — such as birthdate information that can be used to drive birthday campaigns – will likewise be incented to start offering a social login option more frequently

As for social itself, it too will be evolving, becoming more personal than ever. New Facebook ads are enabling smart marketers to achieve hyperrelevant, uber-targeted delivery based on buyer behaviors. Furthermore, companies can take advantage of behavioral marketing automation to serve up individualized content on Facebook. Given buyers’ propensity to interact and engage when they trust the brand, it will behoove companies to create a marketing experience that focuses on building relationships. If you want to take your marketing to new heights in 2013, make sure you’re taking advantage of the unique opportunities social provides to treat people as individuals.

Marketing departments transform to better deliver individualized conversations with buyers.

In order to accommodate new responsibilities resulting from empowered buyers doing more research on their own, forward-thinking companies will be taking a close look at new marketing investments and organizational shifts in 2013. The democratization of one-to-one behavioral marketing will arrive as we hit the inflection point of technology and data becoming increasingly affordable and available.

As a result, many businesses will be shifting budget allocation from broad awareness and programs targeted at demographic segments and industry verticals to marketing to the individual. Think of it is a shift from left (broad) to center (mid-sized segments) to right (segments of one). To be clear, none of these groups are going away – companies will still invest in Super Bowl ads and develop campaigns targeting males ages 18 to 32. But these businesses will increasingly be marketing to “Joe Smith” within that segment — and budgeting accordingly

As budgets shift to account for more behavioral marketing automation, they’ll also be more ROI-driven than ever, tapping into automation’s rich capabilities of providing reporting and analytics that enable to you to track revenue sources in increasingly granular ways. At the same time, savvy companies will also be building in budget for experimentation, giving the CMO room to operate as a “venture capitalist” who invests in new channels to ensure the company stays on the leading edge of these emerging mediums.

With serious risers in the behavioral marketing space adding more technical resources to traditional email marketing, marketers will proportionally be tasked with managing more technical systems (relational tables, analytics, etc.) that help power triggered messages. Forward-thinking businesses will thus look toward hiring and training systems-thinking marketers who are both creative and adept at rules-based logic.

Shifting buyer habits will also require stronger, more integrated departments with new responsibilities for various sections within the marketing department. Examples include:

• Marketing operations: This hot newcomer is playing the primary role of enabling the organization to scale using tools such as marketing automation to accommodate more educated buyers in the early part of the buying cycle.
• Demand gen: Existing email marketers, direct marketers and campaign managers should make both the mind-set and organizational transition to demand generation specialists, including a focus on both inbound and outbound demand generation.
• Product marketing: Having strong alignment with sales is becoming increasingly critical as this department can be a strong asset as a second-level sales resource, especially for large opportunities or when a buyer’s requirements are unique.
• Marketing communications: This group must become more social to keep pace with today’s more social customers, crafting a strategy that connects the company/brand message with critical social channels and influencers to build its social audience.

In addition, a lot of companies are starting to create new upper-level positions (director, VP or C-suite) within marketing to fill these new needs. For example, some are adding a vice president of marketing technology role whose job is to understand and drive all the technologies that marketing needs. Others are hiring a chief content officer to own and oversee content — an indication of how content is becoming a bigger focus.

With all this technological innovation, marketers are going to need more training. Yet Sirius reports that 81 percent of organizations spend less than $1,000 per year on marketing training — and 36 percent spend nothing at all. Top-performing companies, then, will invest more in certification programs, user group meetings and other forms of training to close the gap between marketers’ skills and the processes and technologies they’re now being expected to employ, understanding that this increased education will pay long-term dividends.

Conclusion

The world of marketing can change dramatically in just a year. While considering buyer preferences has long been an important step in delivering relevant and effective campaigns, in 2013 focusing on the customer experience will be crucial. And to build a foundation for a superior customer experience, leading companies will be investing more resources for capturing and harnessing a wealth of data across channels and tying it to individuals.

Of course, data itself isn’t enough to build relevancy. So, savvy marketers will be creating a sophisticated content marketing strategy that takes advantage of the power of marketing automation to tap this data and deliver content – in real time – that’s triggered by each individual’s actions, resulting in astonishingly relevant levels of content served up to segments of one.

In today’s multichannel world, enhancing the user experience also means communicating via the channels they’re communicating with. And that means acknowledging the massive role that social and mobile play in buyers’ lives by weaving social throughout the user experience and delivering content that’s pleasant to interact with via smartphones and tablets.

All these shifts require new roles, budgets and training. Is your marketing team equipped and ready to pay attention to customer and prospect actions and let buyers be their own personal marketing guides, choosing their own brand adventures that lead them down the path to increased engagement, satisfaction and loyalty? If so, 2013 just might be the year you write the most exciting marketing chapter in your company’s history.