By Diane Charton, managing director at Acceleration Media

We have just emerged from another strong year for South Africa’s online marketing and advertising industry, with the market continuing to grow even as most offline media have struggled. From search and display to social and mobile, South African companies are investing more enthusiastically than ever before in digital marketing.

So what can we expect in 2012? We’ll see robust growth once again as brands continue to spend more money across digital channels. The early adopters won’t have the online space to themselves any longer – which means that most brands are going to need to work harder to stand out from the clutter.

Here are some trends I expect to see unfold during the course of 2012.

Social, search and mobile move closer together

The new world of online media is real-time, social and mobile with many South African users accessing services such as Twitter and Facebook from their smartphones. The trend – although exaggerated in South Africa because of high cell phone and low PC penetration – is unfolding in the rest of the world as well. It’s unsurprising, then, that the likes of Facebook are expected to make big mobile advertising plays during the course of 2012.

At the same time, the convergence of social and search is speeding ahead.  A couple of years ago, we saw Google integrate social media channels into real-time search. Now, we are seeing the search giant aligning the Google+ social service closer to paid search and other Google services. The upshot is that no marketer should be looking at its search, mobile and social strategies in isolation from each other. 

Social gets strategic

Most South African brands have woken up to the fact that social media exists, that it is growing and that the conversations that unfold in channels such as Twitter are ripe with both threat and opportunity for their businesses. But the approach many marketers have taken to this increasingly important channel has been at best tactical and at worst naïve.

That will change this year as marketers think about social in a more strategic manner, asking themselves how to align social channels with other marketing campaigns as well as how social media impacts customer support, product design and other aspects of their businesses.

They will be pickier about who they choose to engage with,  put real content strategies in place and invest in enterprise-class online reputation management processes and tools . And they’ll drive social media strategy at a marketing director level rather than delegating it to a marketing assistant or contact centre agent.

The video star keeps rising

Video is becoming an increasingly important part of the content diet, with South African publishers investing more in video content and users watching more video than ever before.  This year, advertisers will catch up with their audience and make better use of video as a medium.

With Google’s pay-per-view pricing for pre-roll ads on YouTube clips, it’s an attractive opportunity that can lead to great engagement. It’s also worth noting that some brands have managed to leverage video very effectively to spread ad clips, such as Nando’s controversial dictators advert.

NFC will be the TLA of the year

On the mobile payments front, we’ll be hearing more and more about near-field communications (NFC), but it may take another two or three years for the technology to start appearing in day to day life. 

NFC is a short-range wireless technology that will allow users to make payments securely to a point of sale terminal or another person's smartphone from a mobile phone.  Companies around the world are starting to explore real-world applications for the technology, with Absa already conducting a small scale local pilot with 500 staff members.

The technology might be some way from mainstream adoption, but marketers can certainly start thinking about what it will mean for them in the future. It could offer some cool marketing applications in terms of gathering customer data, offering targeted promotions and getting coupons to the market.

Analyse this – and that

Remember my earlier point about needing to work harder to achieve the same returns from online marketing? Well, marketers can’t know what their return on investment is in the first place if they are not using robust analytics tools to measure everything they are doing online. 

This year, marketers will make extensive use of analytics to tie the performance of social media channels and campaigns directly to business metrics that really matter, such as customer conversions. They will leverage this data to drive better results from their spending.

Analytics data will become increasingly central in all online marketing decisions, from which media outlets to use through to campaign messages and website design. It will be used in a more holistic manner to understand how various online and offline channels interact to deliver marketing results.

Remarketing ramps up

One technique that marketers will increasingly depend on to drive more value from their online spending is remarketing. This is all about delivering targeted online ads to consumers based on previous website actions that did not result in a sale.

If a prospect has browsed and abandoned a product in the shopping basket on an e-commerce site or was drawn to a product page by a display ad, one can serve a follow-up ad at a later stage while they're surfing elsewhere on the web. This is great way of focusing marketing messages on people who may be receptive to them.

Remarketing is heavily underused in South Africa, but I expect that to change dramatically this year. It has benefits that simply should not be ignored.