The word “futurist” is one of those things that makes my eyes light up, my heart rate increase and my imagination run wilder than George Michael on a bender. In the first of a three-part series on the future of marketing, we delve into what people are searching for around the future of marketing and technology to gain insight into what’s on the top of searchers’ minds.
This three-part series consists of these three articles:
- Part 1: What Do People Want to Know About the Future?
- Part 2: Making Sense of Exploding Marketing Channels, devices, and platforms
- Part 3: Marketing Straight to the Brain
What do People Want to Know About The Future?
Since my background is in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), I naturally go straight to search data to read what people are searching for – like my own little crystal ball into consumers’ heads.
Sometimes search data is very useful and insightful, and sometimes it’s just interesting or downright weird. In this case there’s nothing groundbreaking to be found in these terms people are searching around the future, but it does give us some idea of what people are thinking about and what is trending.
Of course there are the general search terms like “future” and “the future,” but I’m going to skip over those. I’ll also exclude searches having to do with the futures market and trading. Which leaves us with some terms I pulled out and put into two categories: Marketing/Technology and Interesting.
Figure 1: marketing & tech future searches
Notice that people are obviously interested in the future of their computer and phone devices. We don’t see TV/television, car tech, tablets, kiosks, etc, which of course are other devices that can be used to access real time digital information. The interest is clearly in the future of mobile devices (sans tablets…so far).
Another thing I find interesting is that we see “future media” and “future marketing” here, but not future advertising.
Figure 2: Interesting "future" searches
These terms are not exactly relevant to our exploration of the future of marketing, but they’re interesting nonetheless. Here we can see that people are also interested in the past and the future at the same time, future cities, future maps, future work, the future of man, inventions that will happen in the future, and of course future flying cars.
We are a demandingly inquisitive bunch, are we not?
What Does it All Mean?
Not a whole lot so far, but that was fun, wasn’t it? Digging in further we can expose more interest into the marketing world in particular. What people are searching on in marketing is a good indicator of what’s hot now or soon will be.
The table below represents the top 20 global searches in Google in January around the term “marketing”.
Figure 3: Marketing searches
In this economy it isn’t surprising that people are searching for marketing jobs more than anything else. And alongside jobs, people are searching for internet/online/web marketing the most (3.9mm when combining the internet/online/web searches above), then search marketing (1mm combining the two search marketing searches), email marketing (673K), and direct marketing (450K). Social media marketing (not in the top 20 list above) has about 40K searches in January 2010 in Google.
This aligns fairly nicely with Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast in the second part of this series that predicts the shift of marketing dollars away from traditional marketing towards interactive marketing, especially Search.
