November is typically planning season for businesses. Marketers start thinking of next year’s plan, budgets and campaigns. Most of us are convinced that digital marketing must not be ignored yet Marc Pritchard from Proctor & Gamble shocked everyone when he announced that digital marketing is “dead”.

Pritchard explained that digital technology is merely a new way to reach people. The necessary component that has been constant since the beginning of brand building is not the channel, but the idea: fresh creative concepts powered by the way people think and feel, inspired by creativity. Online tools just give us a new way to spread those ideas, in different exciting methods that would not have been imagined before.

In 2014, marketers should thus work this array of well-hyped tools into their marketing plan instead of keeping them separate. It is not about choosing digital channels for their own sake, but rather their fit with the idea and the message. Based on research from Vocus.com, here’s where we think marketing will be heading in 2014.

Search: with Google’s latest major change (known as Hummingbird) the search engine can now better manage conversational searches. SEO (search engine optimisation) will thus now require a keener understanding of the audience, while companies should increasingly focus on content that their customers look for and value.

Social: not only do social indicators affect search but social platforms have also been changing to accommodate better search results. We’ve seen the introduction of the Graph Search on Facebook, presenting results based on affinity, weight and timeliness, taking social search results to another level based on what the user would be expecting and what his/her friends like or dislike. Social networking is more than just Facebook though. Knowing where the target audience is and what state of mind they would be in on the different channels would help marketers spread their idea on the appropriate channel, whether it is Instagram, Pinterest, Trip Advisor or their own blog.

Data-driven initiatives: “Companies that inject big data and analytics into their operations are more productive and profitable”, according to the research conducted by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT.  Not all companies can collect large data sets, yet small businesses can start off from the basics, such as collecting and analysing visitors’ behaviour on the website.

Jason Falls, vice president of digital strategy at Café Press, stated: “If I know it’s you coming to my site (because you’re logged in or I have a cookie for you), and if I can pull information from your social graph, browsing history or other information, I can say: I know you like these kinds of products; you talk about these topics [...] and all of a sudden there’s no common browsing experience.”

Personalisation: having the necessary data would allow marketers to personalise their communication as well as automate it. Sending the right message to the right audience at the right time, in the right sequence, has always been the core of marketing. And digital tools allow for communication to be even more relevant. Once marketers hit the bull’s eye with the right communication, then they will have a greater chance of success.

Mobile: mobile devices changed the consumer landscape. But as SEO analyst Bridget Randolph from Distilled highlighted: “There is no such thing as mobile for the user.” It cannot be considered as a separate channel as it is just a technology for people. Rather than considering mass messaging, marketers should think of mobile as the technology that knows us as an individual and that predicts what we want next with great accuracy – thus reaching only the right people, at the right time, with the right message.

Knowing about online tools, trends and channels is extremely important for marketers preparing next year’s plan. Yet the key to marketing was and remains the idea’s relevancy to the target customer.

To the marketer’s advantage, online channels allow for close monitoring and concrete measurement, thus giving professionals the ability to see how effectively a specific channel is in assisting an idea’s success.

Daniela Grech heads the e-marketing department at ICON studios and is a lecturer on e-marketing strategy.