Study Identifies Email and Video Marketing as Trending Topics for 2017

Email marketing and online video marketing are poised to be big trends in 2017, according to a new study by True Influence.

The study, which looked at the online research data of marketers, found the greatest increase of interest in those topics. Together, searches related to “email marketing” and “online video marketing” comprised 78 percent of total intent signals.

Intent signals include online and digital activities such as visits to web pages across the internet, email opens, white paper downloads, etc.

Interest in email marketing alone generated more than 90,000 unique domains and 5 million intent signals.

Researchers floated one explanation as to why email marketing, which is a tried-and-true marketing tactic, is seeing increased interest: significant pressure to reach the right audience with limited budget.

“It has never been more essential to nail the right combination of tactics that delivers the most dependable and tangible ROI,” researchers wrote.

Also in the top five trending keywords were two areas related to managing data and improving marketing efficiency: marketing management software and marketing automation. Location-based marketing rounded out the top five.

To conduct the study, True Influence first monitored the online activities of companies nationwide for a period of two years to establish baseline activity levels. Second, these online activities were monitored for a 30-day period and compared to each company’s baseline levels. Using this data, True Influence noted the greatest increase in online activity by keyword.

Critical Goals of Email Marketing Also Barriers to Success

Despite the fact email marketing has been around for years, B2B marketers are still struggling to achieve their goals, according to Ascend2’s “Email Marketing Strategy” survey from September 2016.

Marketers identified increasing engagement rate (54 percent), increasing customer acquisition (48 percent), and improving email personalization (43 percent) as the most important goals of an email marketing strategy.

However, the survey respondents identified some of the same goals as their greatest challenges: enriching contact data quality (51 percent), increasing engagement rate (43 percent), and improving email personalization (39 percent).