As the world continues to evolve and marketing continues to grow more and more complex, let’s explore as to what current marketing trends will be the most important for businesses in future.

If every business increased their current client retention rates, increased the revenues from their existing client base, and received just one good quality referral from every one of their clients, the need for lead generation marketing would be greatly diminished- CRMMore and more businesses are opening channels to encourage feedback. Customer surveys are appearing everywhere.As more and more businesses come to realize that their biggest marketing potential lies within their existing client base, we will see ever increasing attention paid to the engagement of existing clients.

All successful marketers today know that effective content marketing is the key to many areas of marketing success.

• Social Media Today reported that 78% of CMO’s believe custom content is the future of marketing. As businesses continue to shift their mindset from pushing ads out to the creation of valuable content that people can engage with and that they want to pull, we will continue to see the rise of content marketing.

This seems like an obvious one, but many marketing professionals are still battling with the uses and impacts of social media within their overall marketing strategies.

• As a current marketing trend, we believe that businesses in future will focus on better utilizing the new social media ad platforms and technologies, as well as how to better use these social tools to create stronger engagement with their current client base.

• Here are some stats:• 52% of enterprise brands say

social media is the top driver for relationship building

Mobile, mobile, mobile. The rise of mobile as a key player in all marketing strategies is astonishing. In 2014 it is projected that around 35% of all search engine traffic will be from mobile devices.

• If you want to be available for people to find you, for people to learn more about you, and for people to purchase from you, an aggressive mobile strategy is important.

The richness of the web continues to reflect the world around us. Many people engage better with pictures and videos than they do with plain old words. One study found that blog posts with videos attract 3 times more inbound links than plain text posts.

• The imagery and videos you produce will continue to increase in importance. As mkt mgrs you have to plan how to incorporate video and imagery into your plan to greatly increase your levels of engagement

Everyone gathers marketing data today. The actual gather of marketing data is the easy part. Each year the level of sophistication around the manipulation and use of data to create key information continues to evolve.

• In the world of big data, the most important decisions are how to distill all that data down into the KPI (Key Performance Indicators) that you really need to pay attention to in order to create the results you need from your marketing strategy.  In future the marketing trend will be to see businesses utilizing key data to make better decisions-DSS, ESS

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The need to differentiate themselves from rivals and engage with customers better is making retailers chant the do-it-yourself (DIY) mantra. So now, customers get to design their own clothes or create their own colours.

The festive season saw apparel retailer Allen Solly introduce a scheme allowing walk-in customers create their own colour for apparel and have them shipped to their homes in a fortnight.

An increasing number of Indians are using online consumer-to-consumer classified services to sell pre-owned goods. Called 'sellsumers' , these are not professional traders but have graduated from the passive act of buying online to actively participating in the virtual marketplace. It's a community that is expanding by the day, thanks to websites like ClickIndia, Quikr, OLX, eBay and Sulekha. OLX claims its page views have grown 50 times over the last two years, while Quikr estimates 10-15 million consumer-to-consumer sellers logged on to the portal in June. Sulekha, which also offers services like product blogs and yellow pages, says 25-30 % of its traffic is driven by sellsumers.

• Frugal innovation: Devi Shetty's Narayana Hrudayalaya to conduct heart surgeries at world's cheapest rates

• Narayana Hrudayalaya, a pioneer in low-cost cardiac care, is building a chain of hospitals that will carry out heart surgeries at the cheapest rates in the world, buttressing India's reputation as the Mecca for frugal innovation.

• A series of design and operational advancements, ranging from construction techniques to post-operative care, will mean that an open heart surgery can be performed for as low as Rs 65,000, or about one-fourth the cost in a corporate hospital.

• Aravind was started as an 11-bed hospital in Madurai in 1976. Over the years, it has showed how social ventures can be viable. A 35% operating margin, for instance, has been possible despite half its patients being treated free of cost

• One of Aravind Eye Care's secrets has been its ability to break down medical processes into easily replicable tasks. This has helped it gain tremendously in efficiency. Also, nurses and paramedics are trained to do a lot of routine work, with doctors specifically in charge of diagnosis and surgery. All this enables a doctor to perform a routine cataract surgery in 5 minutes. And Aravind's doctors perform over a thousand a day. Other examples include Jaipur foot, Annapurna Salt, Lifebuoy soap, Casas Bahai..