With the expansion in mobile technology through Google’s G1 hardware and Android software and bidding on the wireless spectrum, it is evident that they are deeply engaged into developing this market to its full potential.
Also 3G smartphones with larger screens, such as the iPhone, BlackBerry Storm and G1 all allow mobile users a close-to-normal web-browsing experience. This will increase mobile internet use and seeing more and more companies launching “iPhone sites”, advertising will have to follow up on this initiative.
Our perspective: Start thinking up a mobile strategy. You might not lose anything in 2009 if you don’t, but you will quite certainly not gain any cheap initial mobile market shares either. Now is the time to act.
Just like we saw with CRM over the last 15 years, technologies for managing online marketing will merge into solutions capable of handling all types of online marketing both in execution as well as in measurement, and optimization. Solutions will have a much stronger focus on profitability and more than likely the market for online campaign management software will expand rapidly as measurability becomes more standardized. Solutions will provide opportunity to easily execute and measure campaigns across PPC, e-mail and SEM channels and thus break down the more silo based approach to online marketing that has been dominant over the infancy of digital marketing.
Our perspective: 2009 is the year you need to ensure that you erase that last non empirical part of your business strategy by implementing a campaign management system that will allow your marketing division to measure and optimize all activities and campaigns with the end goal of eliminating non profitable marketing.
2009 will finally be the year where companies start caring for their online marketing cost. Our experience so far, is that most companies does not register their activity cost for cross channel performance comparison. 2008 was a year which until September, was driven by excessive growth and thus also less focus on the bottom line and more focus on the click/conversion performance of the campaigns and activities run.
The financial crisis forces companies to consider what campaign delivers the best profit and cut the campaigns that are unprofitable even though they do deliver conversions. Measurability will still be a key factor in analyzing your communication capabilities, but ROI will be the determining factor when it comes to deciding your activity mix and media plans. Technologies that does not support the ability to measure and compare activity ROI will suffer and technologies that does support it will come out of 2009 with a rapid growth in market shares.
Our perspective: Start gathering knowledge on what tools are available that suits your business needs specifically in comparison to ROI measurement and cross channel (PPC, Email, Banner, Natural) comparison. Without it, you will not be able to deliver the right marketing mix to sufficiently generate the revenue desired by management who will quite likely be looking to cut your marketing budget if you do not.
