is-content-marketing-right-for-your-business021According to the digital experts of eprofessional, Content Marketing is currently the most important trend in online marketing. In fact, almost one in two respondents (46%) in eprofessional’s recent survey sees this as the top issue. The company’s findings are in general quite interesting, confirming that the production of relevant content for advertising purposes by now tops mobile marketing, which was still dominant in 2013. At least, this has been the outcome of the annual online poll of the German performance agency this year which performs the survey every year in the run-up to the industry trade fair dmexco.

This time the agency interviewed 105 online marketing experts and revealed that the specialists place mobile marketing and the customer journey analysis at number two of the most important trends (41%). Surprisingly, Programmatic Buying has been only mentioned by five of one hundred as the most important online marketing trend in 2014, although the media coverage gives us a completely different impression.
Besides that, the survey revealed that the flood of information in digital marketing is the biggest challenge the industry is facing right now. Here, more than half of all respondents said it is all about the breakup of data silos in companies. The topic of mobile marketing, and the growing mobile Internet usage respectively, is trend and challenge alike and is a fact that has actually not changed in the last three years.
"Still, the industry finds mobile advertising a hard nut to crack. Besides the technical hurdles, there is especially a lack of user-oriented, creative campaigns that inspire consumers, instead of disturbing them on the most private of all devices," said Michael Hartwig, Managing Director eprofessional GmbH. "Technologies like a functioning cross device tracking or beacons will help us improve mobile advertising."

A closer look at eprofessional’s results of its recent assessment of the industry's biggest trends and challenges is providing the following results:

Trends

45% of the respondents mention Content Marketing as a top trend, closely followed by customer journey analysis (42%) and mobile marketing / advertising (41%). Around one third name as well cross device tracking, creativity and multi-channel tracking. Social Media and Social Media Marketing are mentioned by 28% of the online marketing experts. Worse than expected is the perceived performance of video ads and Youtube advertising, according to the survey. Not even a quarter of the respondents see the issue as a trend. And real-time bidding (Adtrading) and User-Centric Marketing didn’t manage to make it into the top 10 either.

Challenges

Online marketing experts clearly name coping with Big Data as the biggest challenge. Almost two-thirds see a need for action here. And around one third consider the mobile use of the Internet, the sensitive nature of the users in terms of advertising and the cross-device tracking as challenging, as well as the shortage of skilled workers. 27% of respondents are complaining about the fact that the technology in general is becoming more and more complex, 26% look at multi-channel strategies as a challenge, and 25% note compliance with the privacy policy as an issue. Keeping up with the developments in the field of search engine optimization (and of course in particular Google) is perceived as a challenge by 23% of the respondents.

By Daniela La Marca