As the year comes to a close, we are prompted to reflect on all the changes that took place in the field of marketing in 2012.

We saw the rise of Pinterest, several IPOs and acquisitions, an aggressive political ad war, Facebook’s 1 Billionth user, and watched one Korean artist turn into a global phenomenon thanks to YouTube.

So what’s in store for the next year?  We found the guide ‘20 Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2013 and Beyond‘, created by HubSpot, to be very informative.

Gazing into the future of marketing, here are a few of the trends they predict:

“Campaigns” Fade Out, Real-Time Marketing Is In: We’ll start to see best-in-class organizations utilize more real-time events and triggers that are based on inbound marketing activity and not push-marketing, or outbound campaigns.

Inbound Marketing Grows Enterprise-Wide: Every interaction your sales, HR, customer, development, finance, and executive teams take online is a way to promote your brand, products, or services. As a result, almost every employee will turn into an inbound marketer.

Know Thy Customer: Over the next year, it will become an increasingly important initiative for CMOs to invest in technology that compiles customer data in a way that is more easily measurable and actionable.

Marketing Becomes More Accountable for Revenue Generation: Marketing activities will not only be measured on traffic and lead generation, but will further optimize processes that directly impact sales growth.
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The future of our beloved marketing industry is changing fast! Below are some interesting stats that paint a picture on the future of marketing, particularly in the world of Social Media, Mobile Marketing and Dynamic Content…

Stats below obtained from HubSpot article titled, ’33 Stats That Pain a Picture of the Future of Marketing’.

Social Media and Social Lead Nurturing

• 37% of brands would like to use social media engagement to create customer-tailored marketing campaigns. (Source: Forrester)
• 51% of the top 20% of B2B marketers generating leads through social media use social sharing tools. (Source: Aberdeen)
• 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. (Source: Aberdeen)
• Marketers spend an average of 4-6 hours a week on social media. (Source: Social Media Examiner)
• Currently, marketers allocate 7.6% of their budgets to social media. CMOs expect that number to reach 18.8% in the next five years. (Source: CMO Survey)

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Apple is in talks to compete with Pinterest by acquiring its rival, The Fancy, a fast-growing social commerce site.

For those wondering what this new Pinterest competitor The Fancy has to offer, here’s a brief overview of the New York based site. The Fancy is more of an ‘act now’ type of site vs. Pinterest, a ‘dream on’ type of site. Pinterest is filled with great DIY ideas, images of exotic destinations and scrumptious recipes. The Fancy, on the other hand, is more of a shopping site with a unique layout.

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The Flying Squirrel, the Fab 5, the Most Decorated Olympian, Misty and Kerri – these are just some of the many topics that were highlighted in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. In this day and age, with social media as the focal point of communication, you’d think that advertisers might have thought to integrate social media into their ad campaigns during the Olympics. This was not the case…

According to A.T. Kearney, 50% of the Olympic advertisers made no reference to social media in their ads. Only 10% of advertisers had links to their social media sites from their ads. With that said, half of the advertisers got it right. But what happened to the other half?

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