Technology December 16, 2009, 7:37AM EST

The Technology Marketers Need in 2010

Sales and marketing budgets are likely to be tight next year, so British companies are eying low-cost ways to get out their message, including social networking

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With budgets unlikely to grow next year, it's perhaps unsurprising that one of the dominant themes for sales and marketing departments in 2010 will be doing more with less—making the most of lower cost opportunities for marketing and cross-selling wherever you can.

At the same time, marketers will need to respond to the underlying turmoil within the industry caused by audiences fragmenting across multiple platforms, both online and off.

And while changes in media consumption habits are likely to play out over the long term—a decade or more—in the short term, it means that marketers and salespeople need to make sure they're using the right media to engage with consumers.

With all of these new channels opening up, 2010 should also see sales and marketing departments prioritising the tools to both manage cross-platform campaigns and assess their success.

All about online

In unforgiving economic times ROI rules with an iron fist.

As a result, the areas most widely felt to offer the worst return on investment are suffering—which means next year marketing budgets will continue to be channelled away from traditional advertising. Meanwhile, online channels are expected to pick up some of this cash, according to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM).

Mark Stuart, head of research at the CIM, told silicon.com: "The interesting thing about online advertising is that whereas all other areas of advertising are declining quite rapidly and they're not bringing in the ROI that they used to, online is particularly bucking this trend and we're seeing a very strong increase in online advertising.

"I think that's where, over the next year or so, the interest is going to lie."

The CIM's 2009 Marketing Trends Survey report names 'online activities including blogs and viral social media' as the area of marketing expected to see the highest growth this year.

Stuart added that around one in six marketers are already spending more on online than offline—a figure that's expected to rise to around 50 per cent in the next five years.

"There is definitely this move to online," he said, "and although print isn't dead by any means…the tide is definitely turning and we think the greatest opportunities lie in digital."

Analyst Gartner (IT) also tips online as an area for investment. Gene Alvarez, Gartner's VP of CRM and ecommerce, told silicon.com: "As a result of [flat marketing budgets] the technologies that marketing organisations will focus on will be in the online arena…because of the lower cost of that channel as well as the larger reach."

Tapping up the social web

According to Alvarez, spending will be diverted from traditional marketing into online areas including "investment in communities".

For 'communities', read social networks such as Facebook along with initiatives involving "social software" such as microblogging service Twitter. Alvarez predicts marketers will make use of Twitter to run promotions, promote brands and "to remain in contact with the consumer or customer" on the cheap.

The CIM's Stuart added: "As you might expect the latent power of social networking hasn't been reached and blogs and viral are going to be looked at a lot more over the next year or so."

Richard Holway, director of analyst house TechMarketView, also predicts a mainstream role for social networking.

"Brands [will] include social marketing in their overall mainstream plans—social marketing matures from ad hoc experiments to broad implementation," he said.