If the spending of the fortune 100’s are a reflection of broader trends in advertising, it is going to be a good year for online advertising. According to Ad Age, the consumer giant is quietly moving its spend to digital media.
They reduced measured media spending by 22% and moved the spend to unmeasured media. That is an interesting way of describing online spend: unmeasured media. I am not sure what can’t be measured, as pretty much every visitor can be tracked through a website, but perhaps the terminology comes from the world of old media. It was also interesting to me that email and direct mail programs saw a big increase in funding, and the company set up a central fund for online marketing spend. I am sure that Johnson & Johnson will also be putting some budget into the new media of blogs, video and buzz marketing.
One of the oft ignored areas in internet marketing is the area of local search. It is full of smaller companies who traditionally give their marketing dollars to Yellow Pages, local radio and TV. The spend is surprisingly high, but not high enough for the advertising agencies to pay attention. It is these companies who would benefit most from Blog Marketing and viral video. Our clients are starting to dominate local search markets with their blogging and linking campaigns. The doit-yourself nature of blogs makes this kind of marketing extremely cost effective compared to other mediums, and the effect on a clients’ business is very strong.
Just in case you missed them, here are a few interesting facts and observations from late 2006 about the online video market from EMarketer..
*123 million Americans will view online video at least once a month in 2007
*27% of online video viewers watch news at least once a week
*26% watch funny videos at least once a week
*66% of video viewers have watched online video ads and 44% have taken an action on what they had seen
*76% of users will tell a friend about a video they have seen
*Podcasting grew 17-fold in the six months ending April 2006.
*YouTube gets around 65,000 new video uploads a day.
*In August 2006, 110 million US internet users watched video online
*US users stream approximately 7 billion videos a month.
Pretty impressive, and these numbers are growing every day. If you are an etailer and don’t use video to promote your site and your brand, it’s time to think about where you are putting your resources, and why you are not participating in this market.
Great article by Jim Meskauskas in I Media connection talking about the value of online video compared to the traditional method of TV advertising. One of the big predictions of last year was a cataclysmic shift in advertising budgets from TV to online. Some talked of an 89% increase in online video ad spending. So we are already into March. Have we seen that shift. No. Jim compared online video to soccer in America. It is predicted to be popular, everyone assumes that it is being strongly supported, but where are all the fans? The drawback to online video advertising from an advertiser standpoint seems to be that it is difficult to measure. The success of a campaign cannot be monitored in the same way as TV, so people are suspicious.
But the growing reach of online video cannot be ignored. I did a search today on Google for “shoes”. The number 2 and 3 listings were a Youtube video of some band. If sketchers had done some video optimization and rocketed to the top of Google with a catchy watchable commercial, I think someone would be getting a raise.
In a conversation with a client the other day, I found out that not only is Google checkout an eye magnet for shoppers, it is also a pretty good deal. Apparently for every dollar you spend on Google Adwords, you receive $100 worth of free checkout. Google normally charges 2%, a good rate in of itself, so if you spend $1,000 on Adwords, you will save $2,000 on your checkout fees. That is certainly worth looking into.
Interesting article in Search Engine Land outlining an interview with Google guru Matt Cutts. Google has been working on, and will continue working on personalized search results. The theory is that the results you see on Google will be based not only on the Google algorithm, but also on your past searches. This would seem to sound a death knell for a lot of bad SEO companies and for black hat practices, which is great for good SEO companies and for consumers. The interesting thing that he did say was that;
“the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward”.
What I take from this is that according to Google, you should be using blogs, social media, RSS and video to promote interest in your site thus generating buzz and back links. Fiddling with your tags, putting new content on your site, and agonizing over keyword density is not going to matter. There may be something to this newfangled “blog marketing” after all.
As our company continues to grow, and we see clients’ campaigns mature, even we are surprised by the strength of results. We have seen great increases in rankings from the following campaigns;
Blog creation. The client pays us a flat one-time fee to build a search friendly, customized blog. We provide training on the management of and the writing in the blog. The blog helps the search engines navigate into interior pages of the clients’ main site, and also generates valuable back links. The blog can also be used for marketing purposes, enhancing communication with clients and eliciting feedback.
Blog writing. We write 12-30 articles a month in a clients’ blog, focusing on a couple of keywords or phrases with each article. A cost effective and highly effective way of ensuring that the blog is working and being recognized by engines.
Blog linking. We have created a network of bloggers who write articles about and link into our clients’ websites. Very effective in generating text specific, targeted back links.
Taken together, these services are incredibly effective and will outperform any other method available of generating natural search traffic.
It is not really all that surprising that video would begin showing up in natural search results. If you do a search for “shoes” on Google, one of the top listings is a youtube video of a band singing about shoes. Not the kind of result a shoe retailer wants to see. What is surprising is that Metacafe listings are starting to show up on Yahoo and MSN. This could either be a blip and will be corrected soon, or the beginning of a brand new trend.
Is it possible that video results will control natural search? A series of optimized video commercials on the first page of every search engine? With way the internet is going, that wouldn’t be surprising. But where does that leave etailers who are not using optimized video?
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.
