« back to index

 [ What is this? ]

The growth of online marketing

01/09/2005

Sally Falkow, international brand strategist, who has just attended the Marketing Sherpa Business to Business Summit in San Francisco, US, says marketing, advertising and PR will have to focus resources on reaching consumers searching for their products and services online.

Falkow's top global trends are:
1. Pay per click: Pay per click will become a $3 billion industry. According to attendees at the Marketing Sherpa Business to Business Summit held in San Francisco last week, over 75% will increase their spend on pay per click in the New Year.
2. Natural search optimisation: companies will invest in upgrading and optimizing their websites, using persuasive architecture and optimized content, so they can capture the 76% of searchers who click only on the natural search results, as opposed to paid results. Optimized content generation will make an appearance as a line item on web redesign budgets.
3. News engines and optimized press releases: the emergence of Yahoo News and Google News as the number one media choice for news will change the way people market and advertise their products. Just sending out a press release to the media no longer works. It has to be optimized and included in the news engines to reach your targeted audience directly. And for the first time the results from a press releases can be tracked - web analytics makes it possible to track clickthroughs and conversions from a press release.
4. Corporate blogging: business blogging will become a mainstream marketing and PR activity. Blogs raise search visibility and build brand value. Monitoring blogs for mentions of your brand and pitching bloggers will be a new PR activity.
5. RSS and content syndication: syndication of content through the use of RSS feeds is set to become one of the hottest trends of 2005. Not only can your public subscribe to your RSS feeds directly, your content can reach a wider audience through other websites using the content or you can assist relevant journalists by offering them a feed of industry information.