WSI Blog

So, 2009 is now a distant memory and 2010 is in full swing...

For all internet marketing professionals (and actually for anybody involved in marketing their businesses online) there’s little doubt that the turning of the year will mark the latest wave of online marketing strategies and tactics.

The “noughties” saw the explosive growth of the internet as the primary marketing medium for virtually every industry sector on the planet.  You are hard pushed to think of a product or service that is not served better by online advertising than offline, and so we look with intrigue at where it will go from here.

The closing years of the last decade saw businesses large and small beginning to understand the value of the online dialogue that could be opened up with their customers.  The opportunity to speak to them, direct and 1-to-1 is an incredible way of gauging the success (or otherwise) of your latest product launch or service offering, and provides that real-time, real-world feedback that is rarely achieved through traditional surveys or customer satisfaction phone-calls.  The current generation of internet-savvy consumers are happy to log-on to Facebook, Twitter and the myriad other channels, and pour forth about the new gadget they’ve just bought or the great restaurant at which they’ve just eaten.

And so for 2010, perhaps that’s what it’s all about; the rise of Social Media as a legitimate marketing tool for businesses.  The challenge then is how to embrace this brave new world and how to construct a viable business model.  There is no doubt of its value to the end-user, but the question to be answered is profitability for the business owner.  Fortunately, Internet marketers are now beginning to understand how Social Media as a profit centre can work.

As for other aspects of internet marketing, some of the truisms of 2009 will hold truer than ever for 2010:

-          Search Engine Optimisation (for long-term performance) is largely achieved through relevance, i.e. great content, frequently updated.  Ignore this at your peril.

-          A well-established domain name is given greater importance and helps it to rise above the millions of new websites that spring up every day.

-          Businesses are best advised to employ a number of different channels in the pursuit of their overall online marketing strategy.  Not a scatter-gun approach, but rather a joined-up strategy based on specific, measurable business objectives.