Online Marketing in 2007: Forecasting the Trends, Mediums and Misconceptions of the New Year
With 2007 upon us, I thought I’d use my first column to talk a little about where I see us heading in the new year. First of all the online marketing prognosis for next year is excellent. More and more brand marketers are looking beyond the traditional areas of email marketing and banner runs, broadening their horizons as they open their eyes to the potential in alternative channels. Opportunities across the board are growing, budgets are being adjusted accordingly and constant advances in analytics bring yet more validation to our field. The explosion in social networks presents us with even more opportunities, and as the extraordinarily busy conferences of 2006 attest, more people than ever are looking to our field. This is a good thing.
Mobile Comes of Age
The Weather Channel is a great example of mobile done well: package the right content correctly, put it in front of the right people and it’ll be a success. Where mobile is concerned, it’s all about context; I don’t want to read a thousand word article on my mobile screen as I dash about town, but snippets of personalized (or localized) data work perfectly. Weather is the perfect candidate for this, but as we move into 2007 I expect to see significant growth in other verticals that deal with bite-sized chunks of immediately relevant information, such as classifieds and sports.
It seems like we’ve been talking about it for an age, but 2007 is finally going to be the year that mobile marketing comes of age in the US. Granted we’re years behind Europe and Asia, but once we get going we’ll catch up pretty quickly: in this technology and communication obsessed nation it’s only a matter of time before we do so.
Before long I’d like to see Bluetooth enabled billboards in Times Square, collecting data from opted-in participants and pushing relevant requested content. How about GPS enabled cellphones alerting you when your MySpace friends are near, then navigating you both to the nearest starbucks to meet up? I’d like to be able to send an SMS to a parking meter to pay for my parking, or to a vending machine to buy a can of coke. A little ambitious to expect any of these scenarios to play out next year, but they’re all happening elsewhere in the world, and we’re definitely going to see significant growth in the US mobile space in 2007. Let’s aim high.
Word of Mouth
Word-of-mouth marketing is going to continue to mature into 2007, as marketers get more sophisticated about how they communicate their message. New iterations of (much maligned) services like Pay-Per-Post will sprout up as businesses continue to grapple with how to operate in the blogosphere. The issue with Pay-Per-Post is not that advertisers are paying for placement, it’s that they’re doing so without full disclosure, blurring the lines between editorial and advertising. Some would call it unethical but I like to think of it as an industry finding its way: the television model was established over decades, we work ours out on the fly as new technology dictates. I have no doubt that we’ll find a model that works for the blogosphere, I just don’t think that Pay-Per-Post is it.
You Don’t Have to Monetize Everything!
Lastly, I wanted to make the (actually not as obvious as you might think) point that that we don’t need to monetize everything. Of course revenue is good, but just because there’s not an immediate positive ROI doesn’t mean that an initiative wasn’t worthwhile. Long-term benefits such as lead generation, positive brand impression and dissemination of information are all valuable in their own ways. Brand perception, visibility and awareness count for a lot and a well executed campaign that increases visibility can build the foundations for future revenue-generating campaigns. Sounds obvious, but it’s always amazing to me how many times this step is skipped.
The future is bright: we’re very much in the midst an online marketing renaissance as more and more brand marketers open their eyes to the huge potential that’s out there. Measurable results, access to previously difficult to access demographics and across the board increase in online activity are all doing wonders to help our cause. Roll on, 2007.
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Reader Comments.
I like your last point. I think Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is well on the increase. This is giving rise to the “communications objective.” It is much easier to measure and is theoretically a better measure of how well your ad spending is working. This is particularly useful in still changing internet marketing strategies.
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