According to research by Universal McCann, 73% of users read blogs and 36% think more positively about brands that have them. In addition, 83% of users have viewed video clips (proven to offer significant uplift in sales), 49% have downloaded podcasts and 38% have subscribed to an RSS feed, while 57% have joined a social network. Social media presents a huge opportunity at low cost and low competition for market shares due to its young age.
Our strategy: If you do not already have one, then 2009 is the year you should get a blog and tell people who you are, and why you believe you are something special.
Emerging markets that is non-US, Europe or Japan will finally be more lucrative than the good old western hemisphere. Due to the market crash, demographics and countries like India, China and Brazil catching up, we’ll see products geared towards other audiences than “us”. There are 2.5 billion potential internet users in India and China alone within the next 10 years and with the collapse of the western economy, this region could be the next big thing in online advertising. Prepare new language versions for your website, if you are prepared to conquer market shares and actually live up to the promise of the internet being a borderless shopping mall.
Our strategy: For far too many years, marketing has been culturally and regionally chauvinistic. Many companies with non global organizations have been reluctant to promote their business online towards markets in other parts of the world, even though there is no real rational reason to do so. The internet is the perfect platform for selling the same product to everyone without the restrictions of physical localization. Start thinking big now and stop being afraid that someone from Asia or South America will not be interested in your product. They most certainly have the buying power to be just that.
Speculation has been around for some time that Google will shift its algorithm to favor more user behavior metrics. Google has openly discussed these algorithmic approaches in a patent application called “Information retrieval based on historical data” filed back in 2003.
We’ve already seen some of these elements such as domain history and backlink velocity hit the Google algorithm, but what some commentators are now suggesting is that behavior metrics are on the cards. That would mean metrics such as click through rates being used to assess relevancy values in the search results. In other words the better your advertising perform the better you will rank.
Our strategy: If your website is underperforming, it will be downgraded in search results. This will impact Search engine optimization for websites and instead of rewarding websites that has been cleverly optimized, actual reward the websites that is being used. What this means for online businesses is that relevancy, quality and engagement are going to be business multipliers, affecting not only conversion rates, but also natural search traffic volumes. The better you online marketing works, the better your future pagerank will become.
