Welcome to Part 2 of MIH’s Top Ten Digital Marketing Trends for 2012 – our predictions on the online marketing trends that will be making an impact on businesses large and small over the coming year. If you haven’t read Part One yet, check it out here.

6) Get With The Crowd
If 2011 was the year of user-generated content, then 2012 looks set to be the year of crowd-generated content. Proving that ‘people power’ is as strong as ever – and perhaps at its most formidable in the digital world – businesses are becoming increasingly aware that their brand is judged not by what they’re telling people, but what people are telling others about their brand. The idea behind crowd-generated content is to identify those people that are talking about your brand online and act on this in a way that encourages other people to get involved, thus creating a crowd of consumers all talking about your business.

Social media platform Twitter is a great way of identifying who is saying what about your business (or, if not your business itself, the field in which it lies). By engaging with people who are talking about your brand or industry, creating a marketing story around their comments and encouraging more people to join the conversation, you can quickly build a successful campaign around a single tweet.

7) Make It Personal
Tying in with the trends of location-based marketing and social commerce (discussed in Part 1 of our Top Ten), it’s abundantly clear that today’s digital consumer demands a far more personalised online experience than ever before. Users increasingly expect their online content to be tailored to their preferences and customised to the choices and behaviour they have indicated or displayed previously. What’s more, (perhaps unsurprisingly) online consumers show a far greater tendency towards products, businesses or online content they see their friends recommending online.

So what does this mean for a small or medium-sized business? Leveraging what you already know about your customers and making every effort to provide individual consumers with a personalised online service is essential. Email marketing is another area where customisation is key, so be sure to tailor content and messaging to different customer groups for a greater response rate.

8 ) Game Time
Digital platforms provide the opportunity for much greater levels of user interaction between businesses and customers. As websites and online communities strive to create a digital world which increasingly mirrors our real lives, the role of fun, amusing and entertaining content which users can interact with directly is growing in importance – and with mobile internet enabling people to be ‘connected’ 24/7, the concept of marketing that doubles as light relief is surely welcome. In 2012, we are likely to see many more businesses introducing online games and competitions to their marketing campaigns, with a particular focus on mobile and location-based gaming.

By online gaming, we’re not talking video games or online gambling. Short, simple yet creative games and competitions that engage users and get people talking are likely to enjoy the most success. Consider the brand message that you want to promote through the use of an online game or competition, and find a way to communicate this in an enjoyable and interactional user experience.

9) Online and Offline As One
As more and more consumers move seamlessly between the offline and online world, to view these two platforms as entirely separate seems increasingly out-dated. While the rapid rise of the Internet in recent years has led to many businesses steering away from traditional offline marketing methods in favour of the digital, it appears we may have reached a point where we can finally recognise the complementary aspects of these two approaches. Perhaps the most successful marketing campaigns of 2012 will be those that combine and integrate digital and real-life elements in much the same way as the majority of us do on a daily basis.

Integration in marketing is nothing new, but developments in online marketing make it increasingly easier for businesses to develop engaging campaigns that successfully blend online and offline elements to great effect. Marketing strategies should explore and identify ways to combine the digital with the traditional in order to create campaigns that span both platforms.

10) Content Is Still King
As the number of online marketing channels continues to grow and businesses expand their digital presence to cover ever more platforms, it is vital to ensure that you do not let the quality of your content slip. With more content than ever being posted, tweeted, blogged and shared, it becomes harder and harder for consumers to find high-quality, relevant information through the constant stream of digital noise. But rest assured that in the end, they will find it – and when they do, you have a much greater chance of gaining the respect (and associated digital word of mouth) that comes from being a provider of that sought-after quality content.

Ensure that every piece of content that comes from your brand is of the appropriate standard and quality you would demand from your offline written materials. Implement careful monitoring of all social media profiles and make sure that all employees involved in digital marketing content creation are aware of the need for quality content that reflects your brand.

So there you have it – our top ten digital marketing trends for 2012. Which ones will you be following this year? If you’d like to share any other online marketing trends with us, we’d love to hear from you, so leave your comments below…