By Janette Speyer and Katrina McNeil, Web Success Team

New trends seem to emerge daily in customer engagement and it can be difficult to keep up with what has to be done to keep our audience interested. Today we will take a look into the growing trends and changes to online marketing and what they mean for 2013.

Trend: Community Building & Management

Where it’s Going: Online community management is certainly not a new trend, but it is growing in popularity every day. The goal with community building and management is to encourage, facilitate and develop relationships. This can be done a number of ways, the most popular being developing a community on Facebook, Twitter or your own blog. In 2012 we have had an explosion of new communities where we can engage with our customers, like Pinterest, Instagram and Viddy. Marketers will have to find creative ways to market their products such as contributing to forums, helping to promote other people’s communities and always having fresh content for your community are some other great ways to engage and build a following (see more of our ideas for Pinterest).

Trend: Gamification

Where it’s Going: Gamification is a fantastic engagement concept that all companies should find a way to employ. The goal with Gamification is to find a way to make your product engaging and somewhere customers can “play” so that it keeps them engaged and invested. Gamification is becoming more and more essential to stay ahead of the competition. A favorite example, that was created years before this was a buzz word, is Ebay. It could have just been a site to sell products, but adding the bidding function made people more engaged and made the site interactive. Other examples of Gamification include social media platforms like Foursquare, Viggle and GetGlue.

Trend: Mobile

Where it’s Going: A new study published on Mashable ‘s Blog found that 70 percent of marketers plan to increase budgets for mobile in 2013. According to a recent survey conducted by IBM, approximately 30 percent of marketers who have not yet implemented mobile apps or optimized their site for mobile, intend to start over the next year. Other mobile marketing trends to watch out for in 2013 will be an increase in location-based targeting and more mobile ads.

Trend: Multi-Screen Integration

Where it’s Going: Be it a PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone or even a TV, marketers are embracing the idea that they can no longer engage in only one media. Recently published Google research tells us that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal. Media consumption is split up like this:

TV = 43 min.,
PC/Laptop = 39 min.,
Tablet = 30 min., and the
Smartphone = 17 min.

Google says that this is done two ways; sequential usage and simultaneous usage. Sequential just means starting an activity on one device and continuing it on another. While simultaneous usage is something I know I am guilty of, using a device while watching another for either a related or unrelated activity. One way that this is going to make an impact on how marketers engage is because TV is now a catalyst for search. That’s because with 77% of viewers simultaneously using another device while watching it, they find themselves easily able to search on interesting topics or products with a search device literally at their fingertips.

Keeping Up

It doesn’t have to be said that people are busy. Spending our hectic work days and even personal time on multiple devices, we need to find more creative ways to pull in our audience. With online communities becoming more and more popular and accessible, the 2013 customer engagement strategy will be less campaigning and advertisements and more relationship development.

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