Marketing Trends for 2010

Here’s a video from Blaine Mathieu, CMO of Lyris, regarding Marketing trends for 2010.  He does a great job of pitching his company’s offerings, but regardless, I agree with his sense of industry direction.

From a high level, quant skills will be more valuable than ever in Marketing as Analytics is not something just for the web master to care about anymore.  Social Network apps & brand sentiment, Mobile apps, Email campaigns and Search marketing can all be measured in ways never dreamed of before.  The ability to measure and track metrics will penetrate more and more deeply into the mindset of modern integrated marketing.

The tools to build these apps and the contexts within which to deploy them are rapidly approaching maturity.  This should drive costs down well enough to make app development a function of every integrated marketing campaign.  Then tracking all those apps through Analytics will drive a stronger perceived value for quant skill sets in the integrated marketing professional.

There could be a danger of the pendulum swinging a little too far and traditional qualitative skills being slightly less valued in the short term.  I don’t know, but I could see how that might happen.  But, I think over time, qualitative skills will find solid footing again and the integrated marketing professional will emerge as someone who is capable of thinking equally out of the left as well as the right side of his/her brain.