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A Publication of

Marketing Prediction

2013

HITS & MISSES

PLUS Our Favorite Predictions for 2014

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Table of Content
Introduction 2013 Prediction Hits 2013 Prediction Misses 2014 Predictions Resources Page 2 Page 3 Page 12

Written by:
Jay Acunzo
Sr. Content Manager HubSpot
Follow me on Twitter! @Jay_zo

Designed by: Page 21 Page 28

Erik Devaney
Content Strategist HubSpot
Follow me on Twitter! @BardOfBoston

Introduction
When it comes to making predictions, lets be honest, were all in the business of throwing darts -- whether to our bosses (Shes the perfect hire for the job), our investors (Well reach a million users in 12 months), or even our loved ones (Its just one drink, Ill be back by 8, I swear!). And in marketing, we love, love, love our annual predictions. The very best in the business carefully weigh each dart before they throw it. They toe the line, balance themselves, steady their arm, and re as straight and as true as they can. But the rest? Theyre inging darts against a vague idea of the target after one too many bourbons. So, being of sober mind despite the raging Boston winter outside, we wanted to take a look back at where the darts landed and try to explain why. Weve also included a few of our favorite predictions for the New Year.

Happy 2014!

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Marketing Prediction

2013

x x x x x
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HITS

Stop-and-Start Campaigns Will Fade and Real-Time Will Be In. Inbound Marketing Will Spread Enterprise-Wide. Email Will Live On. Content and Social Will Matter Even More for SEO. Mobile or Bust. Marketing Becomes Accountable for Revenue Generation. Big Data Becomes Real for Businesses. Print Is Dead.

2013 Prediction HIT

Stop-and-Start Campaigns Will Fade and Real-Time Will Be In.

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David Meerman Scott Best-Selling Author & Marketing Speaker

The old model of marketing built on a company timeline doesnt work so well, but after decades of campaigns planned way in advance, its di!cult for marketers to change to a mindset based on speed.
Source: 20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013 and Beyond (HubSpot)

Almost a Bullseye!

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Heading into 2013, David Meerman Scott predicted that campaigns as theyre typically known would fade. Gone would be the days of promotions planned in advance with ight dates bookended by moments of silence from the company as marketers planned and held post-mortems. Its simply not how consumers operate in todays economy based on instant everything and millions of choices. At dmexco 2013 -- one of the largest digital marketing conferences of the year -MediaComs EMEA CEO Nick Lawson admitted that, while interest in real-time marketing continues to spike, execution and universal adoption has been more di!cult. (Hey, its not easy to react in the moment as a marketer.)

But, as Meerman Scott predicted, real-time marketing did indeed make huge strides in 2013. Oreos infamous Super Bowl tweet reacting to the stadium blackout led to an explosion of conversation around the marketing tactic, while IBMs global report on the state of marketing showed that half of all marketers used real-time tactics on social media (with that number spiking to 71% among leading marketers). The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) even went so far as to launch its inaugural Real-Time Marketing Conference, as more and more marketers embraced the idea of real-time. Real-time marketing, while it hasnt quite usurped campaign marketing, is most certainly in and here to stay.

2013 Prediction HIT

Inbound Marketing Will Spread Enterprise-Wide.

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Brian Halligan Co-Founder & CEO, HubSpot

The transformation driven by the customer being in control will weave its way into every aspect of organizations from marketing into sales and customer service, and the companies that win will gure out how to become an inbound business.
Source: 20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013 and Beyond (HubSpot)

Getting There!

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HubSpots CEO (not one to shy away from any pub game here in Boston) came darn close to a clean bullseye on this one. In the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report, which surveyed over 3,300 marketers globally, more than 60% reported practicing inbound marketing of some kind to grow their businesses. The lone issue holding this back from a true bullseye is the need for further education around the term inbound -- 20% of State of Inbound Marketing respondents said they were unsure whether or not their practices met that label.

But more than the simple adoption of inbound marketing across the enterprise, the principles of attracting consumers by adding value before asking for it has started to evolve and mold itself to new departments, with sales leading the charge. And it makes sense -consumers complete 60% of their buying decisions before talking to a sales rep, according to Corporate Executive Board, so sales -- like marketing -- is evolving to put the needs of the consumer rst. During HubSpots 2013, we began investing heavily in free products like Signals intended to support this inbound sales style, and we anticipate even more adoption in both sales and customer support in 2014.

2013 Prediction HIT

Email Will Live On.

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John Bonini Director of Marketing, IMPACT Branding & Design

The ability to segment email lists and personalize the content will help to maximize the e"ect of each email, resulting in more qualied leads.

Great Shot!

Source: 20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013 and Beyond (HubSpot)
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In 2013, marketers sent more than 838 billion emails ... about triple the number of stars in the entire Milky Way. Thats plenty to disprove all those theories that email is dead: Its just not true based on volume alone. But lets take this one step further, as John Bonini did in his 2013 prediction a year ago: 74% of consumers say they actually prefer to receive commercial messages via email over other sources, and the improved technologies around email marketing and contextual marketing have shown huge returns for marketers. In fact, personalized emails (i.e. emails sent via segmented lists informed by a persons behavior or volunteered preferences and information) improve open rates by 14% and conversion rates by 10% -- enough to hint at an even brighter future for email once marketers stop sending catch-all messages for good.

Even Googles supposed assault on email with its year-end Gmail updates isnt quite as doom and gloom as the Chicken Little reaction from some industry pundits. Says HubSpots email product manager Tom Monaghan, The big pro of this is that Google is now moving from a default of not showing images to a default of showing images. This is a big deal ... The reality is that under half of email apps default to showing images. Because of this, [measuring] open rates have always been a nice directional indicator, but nothing you could really hang your hat on. The only thing keeping this 2013 prediction from being a pure bullseye is that, whether good, bad, or neutral, the longer term e"ects of the Gmail update remain to be seen. But one things 100% certain: email lives on and could be even stronger than ever thanks to personalization.

2013 Prediction HIT

Content and Social Will Matter Even More for SEO.

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Rand Fishkin Founder, MOZ

For the past decade and a half, marketers have often thought of SEO, social media, and content as separate channels and segmented practices. But these barriers are crumbling.

BULLSEYE!

Source: 20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013 and Beyond (HubSpot)
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Rand Fishkin nailed this one. Just take a look at all the updates from Google to its search algorithm from the past year. Youll nd common threads centering on things like original, quality content and in-depth articles, meaning the benets of blogging continue to skyrocket. Furthermore, a study from Searchmetrics revealed that social signals and recommendations account for seven of the top eight most highly correlated ranking factors in Google results. (In an eye-opener, the report ranks Google +1s and Facebook Likes higher than backlinks.)

Yup, 2013 was the year of content and social taking center stage in the SEO world, and the future should be no di"erent. But, even better in my opinion, 2013 was the year of the humans winning on search -- not the bots. When Google made the decision in September to encrypt the bulk of its keyword data (to go along with previous updates centered on quality content, in-depth articles, and social recommendations), the underlying message was clear: Dont game the system, dont write for the algorithm, dont try to be sneaky -- focus on helping the people youre trying to reach. And to that, I also say: bullseye!

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Marketing Prediction

2013

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MISSES

Stop-and-Start Campaigns Will Fade and Real-Time Will Be In. Inbound Marketing Will Spread Enterprise-Wide. Email Will Live On. Content and Social Will Matter Even More for SEO. Mobile or Bust. Marketing Becomes Accountable for Revenue Generation. Big Data Becomes Real for Businesses. Print Is Dead.

2013 Prediction MISS

Mobile or Bust.

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Theres no denying the need to embrace mobile. End user adoption continues to grow, with over 91% of the worlds population owning a mobile phone (56% of which own a smartphone). Additionally, among smartphone owners, half say their primary internet source is their phone. So we as marketers need to rely more heavily on mobile marketing and responsive websites to capture that usage.
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Not So Hot.

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But lets cut through the chest-beating for a minute: Consumers pay attention to multiple screens, from TVs to tablets to phones, and smart marketers capture attention by adding value wherever a consumer pays attention. In 2013 and beyond, that means there will be multiple screens at play. Smartphones, tablets, and TVs are all major parts of the consumer attention span. And there are absolutely times when optimizing for one, not all, makes sense. As marketers, we should inform our approaches with data -- perhaps the data shows a disproportionate amount of desktop tra!c to your site. Maybe thats because youre trying to reach developers during the workday who are using huge monitors and taking a break from their work. Suddenly, desktop experiences are much more e"ective.

So yes, we all need to be mobile-ready. We all should embrace mobile more than ever. But consumers rely on multiple screens, and we need to be prepared, not by targeting just one, but by embracing them all according to our specic customers and data.

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2013 Prediction MISS

Marketing Becomes Accountable for Revenue Generation.

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For the record, Id argue that most marketers (and denitely most CMOs) want to hold themselves and their teams accountable, want to shed any lingering marketing as arts and crafts stigma, and want to be major drivers of bottom-line results to the business. The problem with this becoming reality, however, seems to be twofold: a lack of measurement and, related, a lack of IT support to marketing.
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Meh.

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As we found in the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Report, the biggest challenge as ranked by both marketers and agencies alike has been proving ROI. Even more frustrating for proving that ROI has been the lack of sales and marketing alignment in many companies (only one-third of businesses have a formal agreement between the two departments to deliver leads and customers). Tracking can also get tricky thanks to trying to reach fragmented digital audiences across so many channels, sometimes with software systems that dont talk to each other. Getting support from IT to tie them all together could help marketers prove ROI, but as the data in the report showed, the IT department tends to provide the least support to inbound marketers.

As much as lots of us want this prediction to be a hit, its still largely aspirational.

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2013 Prediction MISS

Big Data Becomes Real for Businesses.

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Big Data was a big prediction for plenty of marketers and business leaders heading into 2013, but while interest soared, adoption stalled out. A report from Talend, as reported by Yahoo, suggested a disconnect between the popularity of big data and actual big data implementation.

Nope.

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According to the report, the major obstacles in rolling out big data strategies include budget constraints and the skills to actually execute on big datas potential. Those who did adopt big data in 2013 cited the abundance of data sets and the desire to increase revenue as core reasons, but, according to Talends vice president of marketing, Yves de Montcheuil, In the short term, organizations need to address the barriers and the issues holding many of them back -- and once again technology can be the key factor in streamlining the process and making it more e"ective to implement big data strategies.

Big Data thus remains mainly a buzzword to many companies and marketers and continues to be more of a prediction than a reality in 2014.

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2013 Prediction MISS

Print Is Dead.

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Just like The Year of Mobile, saying Print Is Dead has lost pretty much all of its roots in reality. Print Is Dead might rank up there with Sasquatch Is Real at this point. The truth is that print has been terminally ill for about a decade now. Going back as far as 2005 (as Forbes did here) and youll nd major media outlets lamenting or celebrating the death of print media. Its just plain not true!
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Not Even Close.

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Yes, print has been wholly disrupted. But in 2013, one of the smartest, most tech-savvy minds of our modern world (Amazon founder and CEO Je" Bezos) and the owner of a sports franchise lauded for its analytical, forwardthinking ways (Je" Henry of the Red Sox) each purchased print publications in the Washington Post and Boston Globe, respectively. Even Red Bull, the King of Content, the Emperor of Digital Marketing, the Grand Poobah of Consumer Experiences, runs a global monthly magazine called The Red Bulletin. Did they all rise to success by betting on things that are dead?

So no, print is not dead, nor will it die in the next few years. And if folks like Bezos and Henry continue seeing opportunity in print, then Id bet a more accurate prediction for future years very well might be this: Print Reinvents Itself and Bounces Back

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Our Favorite 2014 Predictions

Some of our favorite predictions for 2014 (with a few of our own mixed in).

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2014 Prediction
Podcasting Will Continue to Grow Substantially.
Michael Stelzner CEO & Founder, Social Media Examiner (via Forbes)

Throughout #2014, we think podcasts will be powerful because (a) listeners average 20 minutes per episode (thats an insanely high attention span for online content) and (b) itll be easy for smart, creative marketers to di"erentiate themselves by not producing runof-the-mill shows. Want inspiration? Look to those who do podcasting well (like your ESPNs and NPRs of the world), instead of looking to those who do # marketing or podcasts-as-marketing well (that leads to more me-too shows and will saturate the medium like so many marketing channels and tactics before).

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Why we like it: In a world where consumer attention is increasingly fragmented and precious to come by, where consumers have ALL the power to choose how and where they spend their time, podcasts represent a longstanding but underutilized marketing tool. People struggle to do it right, template-izing everything (the typical format: intro music, intro words, interview, outro music).

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2014 Prediction
Marketing Departments Will Become More Like Engineering Departments.
Joe Chernov VP of Content, HubSpot

Marketers might not turn into full-on hackers next year, but the movement will begin in 2014.

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I predict the maxim, "Marketing departments will become more like publishing departments," will evolve into the phrase, "Marketing departments will become more like engineering departments." The rst wave of this fusion will involve engineers sitting with marketing to help the company "hardwire" growth into the product, but in time the ability to code will become as core to marketers' skills as the ability to write or design.

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2014 Prediction
Social Listening Tools Will Gain Context, Get Smarter.
Mark Fidelman CEO, Raynforest (via Forbes)

In the near future, these [social listening] systems will predict how to best reach your customer and automatically notify the sales team or take action on its own to move them further down the sales funnel. We cant wait to see social transform into a real-time tool for moving leads down the funnel. Today, marketers often focus on the extremes: The top of the funnel, (broadcasting) and the bottom of the funnel (customer support). In the future, context and contextenabling technologies will put the pieces of meaningless data points together and make suggestions in real-time.

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Why we like it: At HubSpot, we love the idea of tailoring social interactions to the wants and needs of the individual. While most of us grew up in a one-size-ts-all world, the future is all about personalization. According to Mark Fidelman, we can look forward to personalization and predictive technologies inltrating the social listening space.

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2014 Prediction
2014 Will Be the Year of Self-Doubt for Marketers.
Kipp Bodnar VP of Marketing, HubSpot

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Marketing in 2014 is going to look a lot like marketing in 2013. While mobile, social, and content will remain at the top of the list for marketers, you will see a bigger push across the industry for better data and analytics. Closed-loop marketing and measuring from visit to customer in B2B industries will go from a rarity to a common practice.

It is likely that 2014 will be a year of self-doubt for marketers. They will question their social and content strategies from 2013 and start cutting programs that are ine"ective. Marketers are over-worked and spread in too many directions. 2014 will be the year that everything breaks. To regain their sanity, marketers will question their past tactics, examine which of them were actually driving business results, then focus their e"orts accordingly. Integrated inbound marketing will continue to be the key to success, as marketers who combine content, SEO, social, email, and marketing analytics will be the ones who see success and are able to iterate and improve quarter over quarter.

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2014 Prediction
The Economy Will Become Highly Collaborative.
Jeremiah Owyang Chief Catalyst, Crowd Companies (via Forbes)

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Why we like it: Weve seen how powerful two-way conversation and human interaction can be. While audiences were once passive listeners, they are now active participants who regularly create and share media. Next, Jeremiah predicts well see a rise of collaborative product creation, as well as buying and selling.

Companies that want to embrace this movement toward a collaborative economy will need to allow the crowd to be part of their decisions. Whats more, companies will need to interact with people like people human to human. Interactions will need to feel more natural and less transactional in order for the collaborative economy to succeed. Its a di"erent philosophy and mentality and goes well beyond brands simply asking what you had for dinner or wishing you happy birthday on Twitter. It is, in short, the ultimate recognition that the consumers have all the power -- over their time, their attention, their decision-making and buyer path, and, increasingly, what a company o"ers to sell. The best products are informed by the consumer (data, feedback, etc.). The logical next (if bold) step is folding consumers even closer into production of product o"erings.

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2014 Prediction
Marketers Will Become More Holistic, Less Channel-Focused.
Mike Volope CMO, HubSpot
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According to Google Trends, search tra!c for "inbound marketing" has been growing enough to surpass previously huge marketing tactics one by one for the past few years. By the end of 2011, for example, inbound passed direct mail marketing in global search volume. By the end of 2012, inbound passed display advertising, and in 2013, "inbound marketing" closed the gap with a huge term, search marketing. So over the next 12 months, we should see inbound pass even search marketing as a dominant search term.
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But that's not my prediction. My prediction is about the meaning behind that trend: marketers will nally realize that it's not about the channel or tactic. It never really was, but in 2014, companies everywhere will embrace that a holistic approach to marketing trumps channel- or tactic-specic approaches every time. Consumers have all the power, and they research and buy across many channels and screens. All your marketing channels need to work together to match that behavior. Tactics like search, email, blogging, social, and so on, can and should be connected using technology, and it should be tracked and measured right down to bottom-line revenue. The inbound methodology focuses on how humans research and buy and not on specic marketing channels or technologies, and 2014 will be the year this nally clicks across the board and at every level of the organization.

Thank fo Reading!
Only time will tell which 2014 marketing predictions turn out to be hits and which turn out to be misses. We promise to meet back here at the beginning of 2015 with our assessment. In the meantime, feel free to check out our 2014 marketing goals template (link below) and denitely stop by the HubSpot blog to keep up-to-date with the latest marketing tips and trends. On the next page, you can nd a graphic showing where all of the marketing predictions from 2013 landed. Cheers!

Subscribe to the HubSpot Blog for the Latest Marketing Insights

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Stop-and-Start Campaigns Will Fade and Real-Time Will Be In. Inbound Marketing Will Spread Enterprise-Wide. Email Will Live On. Content and Social Will Matter Even More for SEO. Mobile or Bust. Marketing Becomes Accountable for Revenue Generation. Big Data Becomes Real for Businesses. Print Is Dead.
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