Digital Marketing: Keeping Its Slice of The Pie
As the economy slowly begins to pick itself up off the floor, we’re left to wonder what effect the past twelve months of cost cutting and penny pinching is going to have on advertising spend ratios in the future.
It’s no coincidence that, over the past year, spend on internet and mobile advertising has increased by 9.4% and 18.1% respectively. In contrast, newspaper (-18.7%), television (-10.1%), radio (-11.7%) and magazine advertising (-14.8%) have all had significant declines in overall spend (see ‘Shift Happens’ video embedded below). It is my opinion that, during the recent period of economic turmoil, many marketing managers were forced to re-evaluate their marketing budgets and the emphasis they place on traditional media spend. Marketers had to become more accountable.
Enter digital marketing.
During the downturn, marketers were drawn to the new shining star of the marketing mix – online advertising and social media marketing. It seems that many of these marketers had seen digital in action but were unsure whether or not to make the transition over to an integrated digital strategy to supplement their diminishing traditional advertising activities. In many cases it was like trying to convince someone who only eats Big Macs to try a McChicken for the first time.
Search engine marketing providers such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing have seen massive growth in recent times due to their transparent, ROI based nature while Social Media Marketing is paving the way for a new frontier in branding and customer relationship management. It is a combination of relatively small costs, massive reach, active audience interaction and extreme accountability that has helped catapult digital marketing above the mainstays of the traditional marketing mix during the global financial crisis.
Being wedged in the middle of the digital marketing industry, this news is music to my ears. However, these figures and trends prompt me to ask the question: How much of the marketing mix will digital marketing be able to retain after the economy bounces back?
It will be interesting to see whether digital marketing will, on average, hold the same share of marketing budget it gained over the past 12 months, or will it be once again dominated by traditional media spend as overall marketing budgets begin to increase again. I guess the real question is, have marketing managers around the world enjoyed their taste of digital marketing or do they like their traditional flavours better?
Only time will tell…
Popularity: 16%
Read MoreGoogle Sidewiki: A New Sensation?
Google has introduced a new feature, ‘Google Sidewiki’, that allows anyone to comment on any website or web page. It’s a great idea, as it allows people to get an overall idea of the credibility of the site.
It works just like eBay, where users can check the credibility of the buyer or seller. But, at the same time it also makes it really easy for people to leave malicious and/or untrue comments about your site or business, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.
However, the tool is fantastic for obtaining general information about a site, finding out if a company is credible or reading a comment that corrects errors from an article.
The main challenge for Google will be to ensure appropriate comments are posted and ranked accordingly. Sidewiki uses an algorithm to verify the quality of comments and ranks them accordingly, just like regular Google listings.
The algorithm takes into account feedback from users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals, according to the Google Blog.
It’s an easy way to share your knowledge and insights about any page on the web. However, it also presents a challenge for website owners as they have to deal with reputation management on a routine basis. This added functionality has the potential to change web users’ surfing and online shopping patterns, and Google is way ahead of its competitors in terms of providing these kinds of innovative new services to its users.
It represents exciting times for online businesses who believe in providing quality services and products to their clients.
Popularity: 16%
Read MoreLink Building: Quality over Quantity
It’s fairly well acknowledged nowadays that link building is an important factor when it comes to SEO, and helps enable your website to rank for search terms in competitive niches. However, most fail to realise the importance of quality over quantity and this makes all the difference.
Inexperienced (and some “advanced”) search engine optimisers believe the more links pointing to your website, the better your website will perform in the SERPs (search engine results pages). However this isn’t always the case and can potentially damage your ranking opportunities if done incorrectly.
Search engines base their algorithm (sorting of results) by various factors, some of which are more important than others. Generally, the more important the factor, the harder or longer it can take to achieve. As link building is a necessity for all websites, it’s situated quite high on the list. Some terms like “credit” or “travel” can take years to achieve due to their competitive nature whereas terms such as “purple christmas tree” might only take a few months, depending on competition and amount of traffic.
The ultimate question thus becomes; “How do I build quality links?” From my experience, it is best to hire a professional, someone who understands SEO, the ins and outs and all-arounds. As with any topic, learning takes time, money and patience whereas investing in other’s time to do SEO may benefit you more in the long term. However, if you do have some time up your sleeve and wish to get started on building your website’s authority, there are a few simple steps you can take:
- Article Syndication: We aren’t all novelists nor have perfect grammar and punctuality, however if you have a flair for writing, article syndication is always a great step to improving your website’s authority. Writing articles relevant to your website and submitting them to well known websites can help you in the long run. Just remember to include a link to your website!
- Linking: Contact other related websites and see if they’re happy to place a link on their website to yours. They may ask for a “reciprocal link” (Website A links to Website B and vice versa). This is not as effective as it used to be, however still is beneficial. Having a one way link to your website will always be more beneficial to you, so keep your website informative!
In regards to the second tip, keep your website informative and people will ‘naturally’ link to it. The more people linking from authority websites, the more authority you accumulate. However, remember to keep everything you do at a steady and ‘natural’ rate so when you do hire SEO services from professionals, the transition will be smooth and benefit you much more.
Remember, quality websites (more authoritative) will always be 10x more beneficial than non-authoritative. Keep focused on quality links from quality websites combined with great SEO from professionals and you will have one quality high-ranking website yourself.
Popularity: 22%
Read MoreThe Battle for Search Supremacy – Google vs Microsoft – Round 3
A little over 12 months ago, I started a series of posts looking at the search engine war between Google & Microsoft (see part 1 here and part 2 here). When we last left the action, the proposed Yahoo-MSN merger had fallen through, and Yahoo had subsequently signed an $800 million search marketing deal with Google which would have seen Google Ads displayed in Yahoo search results. At the time I claimed that this may have been the death knell for Yahoo! Search Marketing but since then the proposed arrangement was abandoned by Google after it ran into complications with US anti-trust regulators.
The last few months has subsequently seen Yahoo and Microsoft enter into a new deal that will see Yahoo’s Search Marketing ads appear on Microsoft sites and Microsoft’s organic results (powered by Bing) appear in Yahoo searches. Once again, this deal will need to jump through the anti-trust hoops but if it does, it shapes as a real threat to Google’s seemingly invincible search monopoly. Having said that, for Australian users this doesn’t change all that much, as Yahoo! Search Marketing has been controlling paid ad placements on Microsoft sites for some time anyway.
After only a few short years, it appears that Microsoft’s Live search engine experiment has been put to rest and in it’s place has emerged Bing, which has launched a massive $100 million (plus) worldwide advertising campaign designed to capture some of Google’s 80-85% market share. The name Bing was supposedly chosen because it resembles the sound made when you discover what you’re looking for (the lightbulb moment), but more cynical users might more logically associate it with a Windows error message dialog.
I have a slightly different theory, as Microsoft no doubt realised they needed to come up with a name that could make its way into users’ vocabulary in much the same way that “Google it” has entered mainstream vernacular. The old name, Live, didn’t lend itself to being used as an verb, but with Bing, they do have that (faint) hope.
So what does this mean for the ‘Google v Microsoft’ battle? The early signs are that Bing is making some ground into the search engine market share, with figures reporting that Bing has captured between 5-8% of the total search audience since June 2009. This may not seem like much, but in a industry worth billions of dollars every year, this translates to a significant jump in advertising revenues. Being in the industry, I’ve also been asked quite a number of times about Bing, and in the 3 years that Live was in existence prior, I don’t remember it ever being mentioned by a client once.
There’s no doubt that Google still reigns supreme over both Microsoft’s various search incarnations and Yahoo but for the first time in quite a few years, it seems that both Yahoo and Microsoft have abandoned their “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality when it came to Google and are now actually serious about taking on (or at the very least, making some inroads into) Google’s mantle as the undisputed king of search.
Bring on the next round…
Popularity: 14%
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