Online marketing trends in 2014

MUMBAI, INDIA: In the years since its inception, the Internet has undergone drastic changes and has had a profound impact on our lives. Internet marketing has fast become a very important factor in the marketing mix of any organization.

The year 2014 will prove to be another year in which the array of internet marketing techniques would increase in number. Enumerated below are some of these trends which will become prevalent in the next year.

Email Marketing - The tabbed approach by industry leader - Gmail and modifications to the way images are being rendered in the inbox are game changers for the Email marketing industry. Our prediction is that reliance on un-targeted email blasts would reduce and there would be greater focus on targeting via demographics, search history and retargeting

Search Marketing - Pure play text ads will slowly morph into engagement focused units with the introduction of image and form extension formats. Also, Google has indicated that listings on brand searches would become more beautiful with "masthead" style ad formats for brand owners. Probably, the only thing they seemed to have learned from Baidu :-)

Display Advertising - It will continue to face pressure from advertizers to drive more performance. Expect publishers and ad networks to build in more creativity and engagement in ad units and discipline in reporting to push for larger display spends across the board

SEO - It will start making a slow transition towards a Hummingbird inspired conversational and voice focused results page. Expect brands and websites across the world to push towards building responsive sites and change their content to account for the shift in the direction of SEO. Black hat techniques will become further obselete.

Social Media - Twitter will come out with a slew of new advertising formats that will fight for marketing dollars with traditional media and online advertizing. Facebook will continue to mine their mammoth database and offer greater targeting to advertisers based on cohort or other sophisticated analytic tools. In India, we expect Pinterest and Instagram to start picking up pace as photo sharing becomes even more endemic.

Affiliate Marketing - It may well be the year for Affiliate marketing in India with the need of the hour being better tracking, strong publisher growth and greater compliance across the digital space. Most advertisers will start pushing this channel towards cost per sale to benefit from the direct ROI that this channel offers.

The author is head, Digital Marketing, BigRock.