2010 trends for online marketing
Deciding how to spend a small marketing budget to maximise return on investment can become unpredictable when you’re talking about anticipating new trends and emerging technologies. As well as smart timing, investing in trends requires a good understanding of your target audience, which is often the best starting point to help assess your best options.
With past fads such as blogging and podcasting no longer providing the audience reach they once did, Anne Parry, managing director of Freshwater’s Midlands arm in Birmingham outlines the top five most effective internet marketing trends for 2010.
1. Web Presence
To help raise the profile of your website, it might make sense to advertise your website content by placing ads on other high-traffic websites. The popular use of content aggregation websites like YouTube are resulting in ‘content nesting’ – where consumers browse through content fed to them through a single web page, or nest. To take advantage of content nesting, website content needs to be nested in as many content aggregation sites as possible.
2. Paid Search
Consumers will continue to use search engines in 2010 as a primary means of finding products and services. Search advertising prices will remain reasonable, and average returns will remain comparably high, offering an excellent lower-cost search engine optimisation tactic. It is definitely worth investing in the highly qualified leads that paid search is capable of producing for your small business.
3. E-mail Marketing
It isn't hard to justify an investment in e-mail marketing when the cost of sending e-mails is so low and when most consumers still consider e-mail to be their primary form of communication. E-mail service providers are becomingly increasingly powerful in terms of being able to provide multi click through tracking, social media integration, auto-responders and new integrated applications to gather intelligence about the success of your campaign.
4. Social Network Marketing
Social media undoubtedly has the potential for your message to be exposed to lots and lots of eyeballs, however, ‘profitable’ interaction will continue to be the exception for small businesses and organisations in 2010 rather than the rule. A good test of your social network marketing potential is to survey your audience to see how many of them consider social networking to be a primary form of communication. If you do find a meaningful proportion of your target audience are regular users, it is worth experimenting with sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
5. Online Video
If a picture paints a thousand words, how many words does a 30-second online video paint? Until recently, spreading your message with video was limited to the television screen, video will become more accessible through online outlets. Online video is interactive, memorable, widely accessible, cheap to create and highly shareable. However, don’t view video as a replacement for text as people still want to be able to quickly scan through a website to find the information they need, and also, Google doesn’t know what you are saying in a video or podcast …YET. It is therefore important to try to find the right balance of text and video for your audience.
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2010 trends for online marketing
Deciding how to spend a small marketing budget to maximise return on investment can become unpredictable when you’re talking about anticipating new trends and emerging technologies. As well as smart timing, investing in trends requires a good understanding of your target audience, which is often the best starting point to help assess your best options.