Page 8 - index

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Trends in 2014:

Content Marketing

beats Mobile

According to the digital experts of eprofessional, Con- Trends
tent Marketing is currently the most important trend in
online marketing. In fact, almost one in two respondents 45% of the respondents mention Content Marketing as
(46%) in eprofessional’s recent survey sees this as the a top trend, closely followed by customer journey anal-
top issue. The company’s findings are in general quite ysis (42%) and mobile marketing / advertising (41%).
interesting, confirming that the production of relevant Around one third name as well cross device tracking,
content for advertising purposes by now tops mobile creativity and multi-channel tracking. Social Media and
marketing, which was still dominant in 2013. At least, Social Media Marketing are mentioned by 28% of the
this has been the outcome of the annual online poll of online marketing experts. Worse than expected is the
the German performance agency this year which per- perceived performance of video ads and Youtube ad-
forms the survey every year in the run-up to the industry vertising, according to the survey. Not even a quarter
trade fair dmexco. of the respondents see the issue as a trend. And real-
time bidding (Adtrading) and User-Centric Marketing
This time the agency interviewed 105 online marketing didn’t manage to make it into the top 10 either.
experts and revealed that the specialists place mobile
marketing and the customer journey analysis at number Challenges
two of the most important trends (41%). Surprisingly,
Programmatic Buying has been only mentioned by five Online marketing experts clearly name coping with Big
of one hundred as the most important online marketing Data as the biggest challenge. Almost two-thirds see a
trend in 2014, although the media coverage gives us a need for action here. And around one third consider
completely different impression. the mobile use of the Internet, the sensitive nature of
the users in terms of advertising and the cross-device
Besides that, the survey revealed that the flood of infor- tracking as challenging, as well as the shortage of
mation in digital marketing is the biggest challenge the skilled workers. 27% of respondents are complaining
industry is facing right now. Here, more than half of all about the fact that the technology in general is becom-
respondents said it is all about the breakup of data silos ing more and more complex, 26% look at multi-channel
in companies. The topic of mobile marketing, and the strategies as a challenge, and 25% note compliance
growing mobile Internet usage respectively, is trend and with the privacy policy as an issue. Keeping up with the
challenge alike and is a fact that has actually not developments in the field of search engine optimization
changed in the last three years. (and of course in particular Google) is perceived as a
challenge by 23% of the respondents. ◊
"Still, the industry finds mobile advertising a hard nut to
crack. Besides the technical hurdles, there is especially By Daniela La Marca
a lack of user-oriented, creative campaigns that inspire
consumers, instead of disturbing them on the most pri-
vate of all devices," said Michael Hartwig, Managing
Director eprofessional GmbH. "Technologies like a func-
tioning cross device tracking or beacons will help us
improve mobile advertising."

A closer look at eprofessional’s results of its recent as-
sessment of the industry's biggest trends and challeng-
es is providing the following results:

8 Asian eMarketing August 2014 - Content Marketing