Brands that want to stay relevant online have their work cut out for them, according to Millward Brown’s Futures Group, which identified a slew of digital trends for 2011.
According to the report, brands will be forced to straddle their presence between the public open Web and semi-walled gardens, as surfing the Web is increasingly replaced by running apps or viewing pages on Facebook.
These application and fan page “gardens” are popular because they allow marketers to control and simplify consumer interactions. However, brands will increasingly need to tend multiple “gardens,” often building different applications for specific platforms, to ensure they are both relevant and present everywhere their consumers want to encounter them.
“It may be easier to drive traffic to a fan page than an e-commerce site, so brands need to be increasingly clear about whether their online objective is engagement or sales.” says Duncan Southgate, global innovations director, Millward Brown. “They must also decide whether to have different offers on Twitter or Facebook than on the brand Web site. Experience and research will help marketers pull the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Another trend is that social graphs will make targeting more relevant. Relevant social integration can delight consumers. A recent Firefly Millward Brown study shows consumers are looking for brands in social media to be more relevant to their needs. Consumers will remain active in the biggest social network (Facebook) because so many contacts are there, but they may increasingly be more engaged in other niche networks that play to their particular interests. Facebook’s scale provides excellent targeting opportunities for brands, but to really be effective, sophisticated algorithms are needed to make sense of the complex relationships between people.
Marketers need to consolidate their measurement with consistency
Continues at: MediaPost Publications Marketers Must Tend Multiple ‘Digital Gardens’ 01/12/2011.
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