Article review: 4 Internet Marketing Trends For 2011
Article URL: http://www.designdamage.com/4-internet-marketing-trends-for-2011/
This is an article written in 2010. Although we are approaching the end of 2011, I find this article still contains useful information for internet marketers.
The author mentioned 4 trends.
1. The Return of Direct Marketing
Now everyone has got a blog, web site, and social media presence (Facebook, Twitter or/and LinkedIn) and YouTube video channel. How to be different? The author says it turns out to be direct response marketing. This is an intriguing and I believe the author is very right. Direct marketing is to solicit direct responses from consumers for a specific product and service. Usually, there is an offer or a call to action in the message.
To make a direct response marketing campaign successful, marketers need to segment target audience. All the above mentioned blog, web site, social media and video channel provide comprehensive information about the online visitors. By analyzing where visitor were from, what pages they visited, how long they stayed in which pages and what comment they made, marketers can make more informed segmentation. Also, with all the internet marketing analysis tools, marketers can better analyze the result of a direct response marketing campaign.
2. The Raise of Social Metrics
This is true. Web and social analytics tools are very popular. Nowadays, it is hard to find a site without Google Analytics. Email marketing tool offers lists of information about if an email was opened, when and if a link in an email was clicked and when, and by whom. Other social media and inbound marketing analytics tools, such as HootSuite and Hubspot, offer report and data more than an average marketer can consume.
In our Internet Market course, HootSuite is mentioned several times by our professor and guest speakers. I think I will let our marketing team look into it seriously.
3. Focus Shifts from Tactical to Strategic
After several years of rapid development in social media, the trend is clear that social media is more and more popular. Facebook has more than 800 million active users and Twitter has more than 100 active users.
Many companies have passed the experiments and wait-and-see phase and are actively engaging in social media marketing. To execute consistent and predictable campaigns instead of one-shot-style ones, companies are moving from tactical to strategic way. Social media strategy and budget are increasingly included in high level marketing plans.
4. Video Marketing Becomes Mainstream
To emphasize the importance of video marketing, the author mentioned a finding from a YouTube marketing company saying that “Americans watch more videos a month on YouTube than they conduct searches on Google”. I believe since this statement is made by the president of a YouTube marketing company, the statement is very much biased. From my personal experience, my search in Google is the number one activity I do online.
The statement of “A video is 50 times more likely to get a first-page Google ranking than a text page” is very powerful. Again, I think the statement is biased and inaccurate. I was personally involved in several SEO projects and recently we hired a professional SEO company in US to help us with our search engine ranking, but I cannot remember any of the SEO consultants or previous SEO articles I read said that a video has such a huge advantage over a text page.
But although there is no reference or survey to back this statement up, I have sent an email to our market team and let them look into this article and see if we can do more about our YouTube channel.