I read a great study recently from Forrester Research that confirms everything I have been hearing from larger companies for years. The big agencies are in trouble with the new media of internet, blogs and social media, and are starting to lose their grip on corporate advertising budgets. Big agencies still account for over 60% of marketing budgets, but that is not going to continue indefinitely. Two things that came out of the report that I found interesting:

-21 % of agency clients would recommend the agencies to others. That means that 79% would not.

-76% of clients had no way of measuring ROI from their agencies of record.

This tells me that most clients feel that they are getting a raw deal, but stay with the status quo. They have no idea of the return, they just keep spending, because that is what they have always done.

The question I have is why? Do these fortune 100 companies have any idea what a company like mine could do for them with even a $10m budget? Obviously not, but that is starting to change. Blogs and social media give small and large companies alike the opportunity to engage in inexpensive do it yourself advertising. Perhaps more marketing directors will come to realize that blind loyalty to big old agencies is not helping their bottom line.

Here at Retail Blog Marketing we have been talking for the last year about how blogs can be used to collect information and get feedback from customers and prospective customers alike. The blog essentially becomes a free focus group. Well, according to Business Week, a lot of large etailers are listening and are letting customers post feedback and information on their websites and blogs.

Macy’s is a good example. They opened up their sites to reviews from customers and they are now receiving over 350 reviews a day. Obviously, this does nothing but help Macys. 80% of these reviews are positive (surprise, surprise) and Macys has gained a definite competitive advantage. This move is also reflective of a broader trend to involve customers in marketing initiatives. According to Marketing Sherpa, by the end of 2005 23% of e-commerce sites had customer reviews and feedback. That had doubled by the end of 2006, and my prediction is that it will double again by the end of this year.

If you couple the obvious advantage of customer feedback with the search advantages of blog marketing, why on earth would an e-tailer not want to follow this trend, build a blog and involve themselves with viral marketing? Beats me.

There are many advantages in using video to promote your website and your products:

People love video. A consumer is a lot more likely to remember and refer back to an interesiting video than a print advertisement.

Videos are extremely cheap to produce. Compared to the cost of a traditional commercial, video is incredibly cost effective.

Broadband is exploding in usage and popularity. It is widely estimated that nearly half of all US households will have broadband by the end of the year. Now people have the ability to watch video without long download times or quality issues.

Video helps break up text on the pages of a website.

Video attracts the coveted 18-30 demographic. This generation considers video to be a reliable source of news and information. Online video for them is second nature.

And the good news for all etailers is that it is inexpensive and relatively easy to involve yourself in this advertising revolution. Contact us for video optimization. Send us your video. Done.

I was doing a search today on Google and noticed that some of the search results had an interesting new icon next to them. It was like an eye magnet. My attention was immediately drawn. It was a Google Checkout. It seems a little unfair in terms of attracting attention, but it begs the following questions:

Is the Google checkout icon ever going to appear in the natural search results?
If you don’t have Google Checkout will you be penalized in terms of the legitimacy of your ad and your click through?

It remains to be seen. It seems to me like a blatant attempt by Google to direct more traffic to paid search and to drive merchants to use their checkout system.

Great article on Advertising.com showing that online video is not going away, and will become a new area for tremendous marketing opportunities, as video optimization and video distribution through blogs becomes more and more commonplace.

According to one study, 66% of internet users over the age of 18 are viewing online video at least once a week. That leads to a logical question for etailers. Where is your online video?

If you have been lamenting the unreliability of the Overture term suggestion tool for your keyword research, Wordtracker has released a free one. http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
This handy marketing tool will help you pick out those hard to find derivations of your favorite keywords. The keywords every marketer on the planet looks for that have low levels of competition and high conversions into sales. Once you have identified these money making phrases, why not use a blog and blog marketing techniques to get your website ranked for them. Sure beats paying Google and Yahoo per click if you can generate a high level of natural search traffic.

Ikea is getting in on the craze of consumer generated content and viral marketing by gathering home made videos of people coming up with innovative ways of making a bed. The winning entry walks off with $5,000, but what does Ikea get out of the deal? A lot more than $5,000. People are undoubtedly going to come up with strange and unusual videos that will spread like wildfire and promote the IKEA brand all over the internet. So why are more companies not doing this? Beats me. Every company that brands its products and wants to be well known should be using blogs and video optimization as a matter of course.