This year will be a pivotal one for the digital marketing industry, with mobile and social media playing a significant role in a series of developments set to sweep through the sector.

So say analysts from international search engine optimisation firm, bigmouthmedia, who believe an evolving search landscape, the continued rise of social media and advances in mobile technology will combine to make this year one of the most eventful in the sector’s history. With these and other factors blurring the boundaries between PR, marketing and customer care, the company also predicts that the shape of the search business itself will begin to change.

Andrew Girdwood, bigmouthmedia’s head of search, said: “Digital marketing has always been a dynamic industry, but the introduction of real time search, the continued convergence of devices and the apparently unstoppable rise of social media have all come together at the same time and we expect this to have a major impact upon the search landscape in 2010.

"The industry has matured and already we are seeing some of the more prehistoric SEO business models out there beginning to fail. Major clients increasingly require partners with international scale and, as the downwards pressure on costs continues, small-scale agencies are going to struggle to cope in what is likely to become an environment dominated by a handful of major players.”

Bigmouthmedia’s sector-by-sector predictions for the year ahead indicate that the digital marketing business could be facing one of the most challenging years in its history.

Retailers are expected to continue investing in social media strategies designed to monetise direct marketing channels like Twitter and Facebook, while simultaneously expanding their mobile marketing activities.

In the travel business, operators seeking to offset a fall in revenues caused by the global recession will increasingly look online. Some 57 per cent of travel marketing budgets will be spent online in 2010, while the majority of companies are also predicted to increase spend on social media and online PR and search engine optimisation as they attempt to come to terms with this evolving channel.

In the world of finance, the advent of the widely predicted new supermarket banking services looks set to dominate the UK sector’s year. A scramble has already begun, meanwhile, to win over the significant increase in consumers expected to return online and begin shopping for services again in 2010, says bigmouthmedia.

Girdwood added: “The search marketing business has weathered the economic downturn better than most, but there is no room for complacency. For every one of the opportunities these new developments bring there are technical and logistical challenges to be overcome.”