There are three key shifts/themes/challenges/opportunities that we feel we influence senior marketing executives (responsible for strategy, not execution) over the next year – and beyond.
Customer Centricity.
Essentially, getting to know your customer better, putting them at the heart of your business, and using that knowledge to improve your operations (and I don’t just mean marketing).
You can break customer-centricity down a little further, into four key goals:

1. Know your customers better: Dig into your data to learn who your customers are and how to target them
2. Put your customers at the centre of decision-making: Internal structures and processes to ensure your customer has a voice in every level of your organisation
3. Move beyond demographics to individuals for effective marketing response
4. Learn how to make efficiencies through better targeting – saving time and money

Accessible Consumer and Increasing Marketing Complexity
Over the last few years, the ways a company can engage with a consumer has increased exponentially. Social, local, mobile, augmented reality, QR codes – all these new channels have come onto the scene, while the importance of email, digital advertising, TV, direct mail and other more traditional channnels is not in question.
There is a huge opportunity here – for more complex, tailored, and – above all – engaging, marketing from brands to customers. However, there is also an enormous challenge – complexity. And it’s a pressing challenge – currently, mass marketing has a 2% response rate, and that’s declining. And there’s a knowledge gap – 70% of CMOs believe marketing complexity will be ‘high’ or ‘very high’ in the next 5 years – but less than half of them are prepared to cope with it.
The key issues that CMOs are wrestling with when dealing with this change are:

• How do they work internally to shift traditional thinking regarding campaign management, channels and approaches – to catch up with the new consumer
• How can their company leverage the fact their consumer is more accessible than ever. Specifically, how should one manage multiple vertical campaigns through social, mobile, local and other channels
• Is it possible to finally crack the age-old problem of creating consistent local messaging for a global business

The Death of Push Marketing
It turns out that mass marketing now gets a 2% response rate. And it’s dropping. Unsurprising, really – whenever anyone asks consumers what they want, it’s pretty rare they say “Boilerplate sales messages please”. Your customers now want valuable, long-term engagement with a company that seems to give a damn who they are and what they care about.
Our third theme is the need for CMOs to completely shift how they engage with their consumers – from short-term, mass market, declarative messaging. Now you’ve got to create long-term relationships, based on valuable content and conversations.

Talk like a human – and sing from the same hymn-sheet

The advent of social media has meant that the world of separate internal and external messaging has disappeared. If a customer talks to your Customer Service department, they expect the same response they’d get if they talk to marketing, or sales, or engineering. Creating a unified external face is critical. If you want to build long-term relationships, you’ve got to have a consistent, human voice – coming from all levels of your organisation.

Create valuable content to foster meaningful relationships

Further, customers are no longer happy with receiving badly-targetted sales messages. When social got popular and companies jumped on the bandwagon, they expended all their efforts gathering followers. And then they tried to sell to them.

Didn’t work.

Customers don’t want exclusive deals. Or interesting new products. They want valuable information that matters to them.

So content creation and distribution is the second piece of the puzzle. You’ve got to create content that is engaging, relevant and of value to your consumers.

So, two more problems to wrestle with.
First, you’ve got to get every internal department singing from the same hymn-sheet. They’re all external-facing now, and they’ve got to act like it.
Second, if you’re going to raise awareness, build relationships, and engender loyalty, traditional marketing doesn’t cut it. Start generating (good) content.

By Nick Johnson

Source: 

http://usefulsocialmedia.com/blog/analysis/the-three-key-marketing-trends-for-2013-based-on-feedback-from-100-cmos-and-senior-execs/