A new marketing research project created by two branding companies (Mechanica and Fast Company) called Branding Forward Project, has been launched to provide insights and knowledge from (and to) online marketers. Hundreds of professional marketers and experts participated in the research so far and it is still ongoing.

Although the research contains many interesting insights, i would like to focus on the perception of how different online forces are impacting and what marketing tactics and methods are perceived as working/not working/can’t be measured. I chose these research aspects because i think they can produce the most value for your work at home.

Biggest Forces Of Marketing Impacts

Few gaps have been discovered when the participants asked what are the biggest forces of impact and how these impacts affects they organizations at the moment. The gaps can be explained by the differences between future expectation/predictions (“Marketing World” in the diagram) and to the reality today (“My Organization”).

For example, huge percentage of marketers (70%) perceived the rise of the social media as the biggest force of impact, however, only 49% said it is affecting their organization today. Media fragmentation (distribution) had a similar gap- 41% sees it as a high force of impact but only 24% feels it really affecting their organizations.

Other big forces of impact that were also relatively correlated between their perception and actual affect- Personalized user experience (48% perception, 42% actual affect), effective advertising ROI (44% perception, 37% actual affect) and increasing competition (42% perception, 35% actual affect).

Marketing Tactics and Methods Effectiveness

Proven Effectiveness Tactics/Methods
72% of the participants agreed that SEO/SEM are still the highest rated proven effectiveness marketing tactics/methods, similar to the conclusions of the survey by Webmarketing123 (SEO Is Still The Most Dominant Field). Other proven high rated effective tactics/methods are analytic dashboard (63%) and automation platform of sales force (57%)

Not Working Effectiveness Tactics/Methods
There wasn’t any decisive conclusion which are the less effective marketing tactic/method. For example, 24% agreed that ad exchanges isn’t an effective tactic/method but 35% found it effective and 24% can’t prove it is working.

Can’t Prove Effectiveness Tactics/Methods
Most of the tactics/methods that can’t be measured or proved as working, relates to the social media- Location based mobile social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla (14%), social monitoring and analysis (9%) and branded apps (7%).