Now that we have good reason to think that retail growth will continue for at least another year (see Jeff’s post below), it would be nice to know what kind of marketing techniques to use on all of these buyers.
eMarketer.com put the results of the end-of-the-year Ad:Tech and MarketingSherpa reports into an easy to read grid.
Here are a few places where marketers plan to increase their advertising spending in 2007.
Search Marketing - 34% say they will increase in this area - while only 25% say they will increase their SEO spending.
E-Mail Marketing - E-Mail marketing to in-house lists will be increased by 27% , but in 2007 only 13% said they will increase e-mailing to third-party lists.
This makes sense in the new Social Networking aspect of Web 2.0; people want to get to know a person before they buy from them. As always, the list created by the owner will always out-perform any others for that list owner.
These are just a few of the observations made, you can check out the report for the full list.
Speaking of Web 2.0, quite a few things on the list that have to do with emerging advertising tactics:
Social networking budgets will be increased by 40% of advertisers - this type of advertising wasn’t even around in 2005! Ads on 3rd party blogs and blog networks will also be increased, as will RSS Feeds, Video ads and sponsored podcasts (again, only a partial list from the full grid).
It’s worth keeping an eye on these upcoming advertising methods. Some of them are easy to incorporate (e.g. RSS feeds), others will take more time and thought (video and podcasting).
It’s definitely going to be worth doing several tests to find out what will work best in your market - and go from there.