2011 B2B marketing forecast: SNS investment returns continue to be questioned

According to foreign media reports, 2010 was a year when social media changed from cutting-edge technology to mainstream technology. Some people predict the merger of Twitter and Facebook or the collapse of Foursquare, but industry insider Michael Brenner insists that most B2B businesses talk about practical topics and put forward the following predictions:

1. As we expected, marketing automation and automatic sales lead cultivation will become the basic B2B marketing activities to accelerate the transactions completed through our channels.

2. Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Customer Retention will once again become key indicators for B2B businesses and will be used to measure their overall marketing program performance.

3. As digital marketers begin to understand and acknowledge the true value of the “last click” problem, the attribution model will become a hot topic. In this issue, the result of the marketing campaign is related to the last strategy that the buyer contacts.

4. Consistent marketing and sales continues to be the number one issue that hinders marketing capabilities from becoming a major driver of B2B business value.

5. The debate on the quality and quantity of sales leads will continue. (Hint: You have to do both things)

6. The return on investment of social media plans will continue to be questioned by some officials. Many marketers and business executives will question the value of social media (mostly in private questions). Others understand what has already worked.

7. Inbound marketing spending will account for a larger share of the marketing budget, but in most B2B companies the distance from the majority is still far behind.

8. The shortage of digital marketing talent will generate a seller market for online, search and social marketers.

9. As advanced, targeted, retargeted, and behavioral technologies allow marketers to display real value in display advertising, display media will recover.

10. The brand is back! This result improves when we achieve a balance between cognitive activities and pay-per-performance payments based on effective thinking techniques.

11. As the economy improves, colleagues and managers will begin to respect their employees. We will again find that satisfied employees will create loyal and satisfied customers. These customers will improve the profitability of merchants.

12. From the point of view of the newspaper's gradual decline in the impact of world news and internal communications on corporate news, traditional communications, including e-mail, will be difficult to contend with the astonishing rise of mobile device applications. Mobile devices can be used to browse the web, send text messages and write microblogs to attract consumers' attention.

13. iPads and other tablet computers will make laptops obsolete, and more and more people will transfer 100% of their digital work and personal life to tablets.