Entries Tagged 'Interactive Marketing' ↓

An interesting post from Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog that warrants sharing with our audience in case anyone missed it. They conducted a recent reader poll of 400 business marketers asking what are the three internet marketing tactics they plan to emphasize over the next six months and the results are as follows:

• Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes)
• Blogging (33%, 134 Votes)
• Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes)
• Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes)
• Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes)
• Blogger relations/blog PR (14%, 56 Votes)
• Microblogging (Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku) (11%, 47 Votes)
• Affiliate marketing (11%, 47 Votes)
• Advertorial (NewsForce, AdFusion) (10%, 40 Votes)
• Video marketing (7%, 29 Votes)

Search engine optimization, blogging and PPC take the top 3 spots. Glad that we are in all three of those businesses with TruView and TruCast (shameless product mentions). Lee has some additional commentary on other categories/choices and I especially agree with his comments about social media investments in engagement strategies. We continue to see many major brands investing in social strategies to do more that just listen. What do you and your organization plan to focus on for the next six months? How will you be measuring ROI to continue to secure budgets and funding for your initiatives?

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

It has been a week of digesting many of the latest papers and data points from IDC, Forrester, and Gartner. Since, I have shared some Forrester and Gartner updates I thought I should post on IDC’s latest figures about Internet advertising revenue which project a doubling from $25.5 billion in 2007 to $51.1 billion in 2012. That will make the internet the #2 advertising medium in five years, growing about eight times as fast as advertising at large. This will make the internet bigger than newspaper, cable TV, broadcast, and second only to direct advertising.

Video advertising will be the principal disruptor of Internet advertising during this time, as its revenue grows sevenfold from $0.5 billion in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate of 49.4%. Brand advertisers will shift significant amounts of money into video commercials, primarily from broadcast television and to a lesser extent from cable television.

IDC concludes that

• Search ads will remain at the top of the Internet ad hierarchy with revenue at $10.4 billion last year, reaching almost $18 billion in 2012. IDC believes search, now having almost 41 percent of the market share, will have just above 34 percent by 2012.
• Online video ad spending will grow from about $500 million in 2007 to $3.8 billion in 2012 and its Internet advertising share will expand from 2 percent to 7.4 percent.
• Referral and lead-generation services will see the second strongest market share gain, says IDC. Revenue from referral and lead generation services will grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $5.9 billion in 2012.
• Mobile advertising will also show robust growth but the segment will still have “just shy” of 1 percent of the overall online ad market by 2012.

Amazing projections, let’s just hope that brands and their agencies are listening to this and paying attention to the consumers that are consuming it.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Did you know that next month you can find me speaking at WOMM-U? May 8 and 9 I will be in Miami Florida enjoying the weather and the 2-day comprehensive and interactive educational experience that is WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Marketing University.

Let me know if you are planning on attending. I’m looking forward to a great event.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Peter Kim, a lead analyst at Forrester, is kicking off a session on Word-of-Mouth Marketing with Janet Eden-Harris from Umbria and Dave Balter from BzzAgent. Pete opens with some updated stats about the decline of mainstream media consumption and the increasing amount of time consumers are spending on the Internet. The time consumers are spending is increasingly spent around creating, sharing and consuming content in ways they hadn’t before. With respect to content that is passed along not all content is equal - it is important to remember it is a reflection of the sender.

Janet from Umbria, now a division of JD Power & Associates, shared a variety of case studies from SC Johnson and a major jeans manufacturer - some interesting insights around some of their client engagements. Dave shared what his definition of WOM is “the sharing of an honest opinion between two people”. He then explained their “BuzzAgent” process which is consumer enrollment, campaign invite, product/service shared with folks invites, then feedback reporting for the agents. Everything is transparent and non-scripted. An interesting stat - “40% of WOM interactions include another media form”. WOM is a high-effective in compliment to traditional media - you need a mix. Also, remember a large portion of WOM actually takes place offline verses online. Very interesting stats as measured by BzzAgent about the effectiveness of WOM’s viral nature. The example provided was that when they start a program with say 10k agents they then reach out to 12 individuals on average who then speak to 4.14 individuals for a total WOM effect/factor of 628,000 conversations. Naturally, these happen over a period of time and generate the equivalent of 1.4M hours of conversations.That is pretty impressive but results scaled down a bit as you move away from B2C and tangible products. Some solid questions and audience participation about whether it can really work in B2B or for services verse tangible products.

Good session - Pete, Janet, Dave.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, of Forrester and Groundswell fame, are conducting a session about the groundswell that is affecting brands and companies. The four step approach to the groundswell for companies and brands is to think in term of the following acronym “POST” (People, Objective, Strategy, and Technology). To tap into the groundswell there are a couple of groups that can benefit from leveraging social media such as: Researchers for “Listening”, Marketing for “Talking”, Sales for “Energizing”, and Support for “Supporting”. Their is a big need for brands and companies to develop two-way conversations/dialogue with customers in order to fully leverage the value with social media.

A variety of examples about social media engagement/viral video like the tried and true “blending i-phone”, but a great new example of how Ernst & Young is engaging to aid recruitment strategies and P&G are approaching things very differently to engage with consumers. Charlene’s examples were to highlight the new ways of talking and engaging with customers via social media. Josh is up now and is covering the “Energizing” portion of the session. Examples highlighted Friskers and Brides.com. And a great overview of Dell and Lionel Menchaca’s team, who we are proud to support with our TruCast technology. The punchline is listen, learn, get started, don’t try to boil the ocean, focus, pilot, engaged and then replicate.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies