Nearly one-fifth of marketing dollars will go to social in five yearsSocial marketing budgets are constantly going up, according to “The CMO Survey” from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association (AMA).

2. Data Will Become Even More Important – I read many conversations on the web each day about marketing and growing businesses. It is often scary to me how many of those discussions fail to mention the importance of data. When it comes to product development and distribution for B2B companies, the future is about data. The internet and the social web have turned on a firehouse of data that has the potential to empower business decisions like never before. Data will help discover emerging markets and provide direct feedback from customers on the best methods of product distribution.

We’re identifying lending industry situations in FICO Score Trends that to our knowledge have never been seen before,” said Dr. Mark Greene, CEO of FICO. “Economic instability is creating unknown risk in lenders’ credit portfolios as well as counter-intuitive trends in consumer behavior.

Wowee.

The latest quarterly figures showed that federally insured commercial banks and savings institutions posted aggregate profit of 914 million dollars in the fourth quarter, a huge rebound from the 37.8 billion dollar net loss the industry sustained in the fourth quarter of 2008. 

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The number of banks on the FDIC’s “problem list” rose to 702 from 552 on September 30. The total assets of “problem” institutions increased during the quarter to 402.8 billion dollars. 

Forty-five banks failed during the fourth quarter, bringing the total number for the year to 140, the highest since 1992. 

via Banking Profits and Problems.

While marketers remain positive about the role email will play in meeting their goals in 2010, they are also prepared to face related challenges. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said the biggest challenge in the coming year will be “inbox clutter.” Not surprising, given that Forrester Research estimates consumers will receive more than 9,000 email marketing messages a year by 2014.

Twenty percent of email marketers said they will struggle with “providing timely and relevant content.” MarketingSherpa has reported that lack of relevance is the No. 1 reason people unsubscribe to email programs. To ensure messages are anticipated and welcomed, 27 percent of marketers surveyed plan to incorporate behavioral targeting into email campaigns for the first time in 2010, and 26 percent will begin to use surveys to gather useful customer data.

I get the challenge: gaining and engaging customers deluged with largely irrelevant email in the B2C space. But for B2B, the challenge is adapting behavioral targeting to business organizations which likely do not behave similarly to consumers. I’m curious to see how behavioral targeting plays out for B2B.

Rogers says she and Peppers first began talking about the concept of one-to-one marketing in 1993. Since then, they’ve taken deep dives into ideas like “return on customer,” which means that a company should sell the right products to customers instead of finding customers for the products they want to sell, and taking the long view, or emphasizing lifetime value. That last idea deals with beating “the crisis of short-termism” among companies, to paraphrase the title of their latest book.

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(From Eric Shmitt quote) But I think even more … more important than that now is just the continued integration of new sources of data. And then the application of that combined database to drive intelligent communications through these new channels.”

The article looks at the trends for B2C but I think the above are just as relevant for B2B.