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5 Digital Marketing Trends to Watch

By Ashley Brown

If this year’s SXSWi conference is any indication, the foremost digital marketing trends of 2011 will be central to one theme: user presence.

Too often, businesses over-engineer their marketing efforts in an attempt to capture the attention of their audiences’ minds and wallets. But audiences are smart, and they’re immune to these efforts.

We no longer seek out information — we expect information to be seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives. Picking up on that trend, small businesses plan to increase spending on inbound marketing in 2011, according to recent reports. These efforts will include established initiatives such as Facebook campaigns and location-based advertising, but businesses will also experiment with a handful of new (and not so new) strategies. Here are five digital marketing trends to watch as the year unfolds.

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#3: Don’t over-focus on marketing

 “All too often, businesses overlook the ’social’ part of the phrase social media marketing and jump straight into the ‘marketing’ part… to their detriment. They forget that social media is dominated by a community of people who have expectations of the various social networks to which they belong. Very often, these expectations do not include having marketing messages jammed down their throats,” explained Hollis Thomases, author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day.

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Take a look at the Content Insider view of what's going on and see if you agree...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iCMrR-OtDxfx_mMCXYj80Oj_OnmdA-_RuK8hAXUK3xM/edit?hl=en>