digital marketing
Advertisers to Spend $1.7 Billion on Social Networks in 2010
The latest numbers from eMarketer project that advertisers will spend nearly $1.7 billion in the U.S. on social networking sites in 2010. Worldwide, spending will hit $3.3 billion according to the report.
The numbers represent a significant bump up from estimates published by the research firm at the end of last year, when it projected $1.3 billion would be spent on the space in the U.S.
Not surprisingly, eMarketer sees about half of that money (in the U.S.) going to Facebook, with MySpace continuing to see a smaller share of the pie. Separately, the firm estimated that Facebook’s 2010 revenue would hit $1.2 billion in a report published last week.
Earlier this month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that some of the social network’s biggest advertisers had boosted ad spending by 10x this year; a trend that’s apparent in the eMarketer report.
Via: Mashable
How Social Media Drives New Business: Six Case Studies
Businesses both big and small are flocking to social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Foursquare. The fact is that a presence on these platforms not only allows companies to engage in conversations with consumers, but also serves as an outlet to drive sales through deals and coupons.
And while major brands like Starbucks, Virgin, and Levi’s have been participating in the social web for some time now, the rate of adoption among small businesses is increasing too. According to a recent University of Maryland study, social media adoption by small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the last year. But as these businesses look to Facebook and Twitter to connect with customers, many are finding that some strategies work and some do not produce results. We’ll be exploring these questions at a panel on Social Media and Businesses at our Social Currency CrunchUp on July 30. We’ve found some local and national businesses using social media effectively, ranging from Levi’s to a creme brulee cart, whose case studies are below. Some of these businesses will be sharing their experiences at the CrunchUp (You can buy tickets to the CrunchUp here).
Via: Techcrunch
Check out these great case studies they are quite interesting.
Dominos UK Social Media Initiatives Help Increase Profits by 29%
According to Domino’s UK financial earnings report, the company has increased its pre-tax profit by nearly 29%, which equates to roughly $26 million. The UK pizza retailer attributes social media initiatives and its Foursquare promotion for the gains.
In the earnings statement, CEO Chris Moore points to the rise in online orders — which now account for 32.7% of all orders — as proof that their web and social media efforts are paying off.
Moore reports that when it comes to the web, “Our main Facebook site now has in excess of 36,000 fans In addition, we have led the way with social media initiatives such as affiliate marketing, our superfans programme and the development of a link up with Foursquare.”
Via: Mashable
5 Tips for Managing Your Companys Brand on the Web
Brand management in the current era means not just keeping an ever-present eye on the social web, but also engaging in meaningful ways with brand advocates and detractors. Professionals in the field have come to accept social media as crucial to their jobs, but most know that managing a company’s brand on the web is so much more than setting up shop on social sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Here we’ll give you an inside look at the strategies of avant garde industry leaders who’ve spent years figuring out how to move beyond social media hype and implement practical management practices into their daily work routines.
Brad Nelson, Jeremy Thum, Joel Price, Joel Frey and Bowen Payson are all marketers behind big brand names. They’ve done the dirty work. Their lessons and words of wisdom range from finding ways to unify digital assets to knowing your niche, and each tip should be heeded by those looking to follow in their footsteps.
1. Let Someone Else Say It
2. Unify Digital Properties
3. Leave Your Ego Behind
4. Know Your Niche
5. Don’t Wallow or Gloat
Via: Mashable
Just setting up a Twitter and Facebook accounts isn’t enough on today’s social internet honest customer engagement is key to any company’s brand.
The Factor x 10 drives traffic from social media and video portals
The Factor of 10 increases a website’s chances of being found by a factor of 10. The program creates 10 Points of Presence (POPs) out on the internet to increase your chances of being found and at the same time increasing your current website’s popularity with all the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Each of these pages is specially formulated (SEO) for the search engine spiders to find and index their content, thus by creating these satellite websites out on the web we create a network of doorways for people to find you. These satellite pages can exist anywhere, even inside the Facebook network.
The Factor x10 Examples:
Satellite Pages
Facebook Fanpages
YouTube Channels
Please contact us to find out more about the Factor of 10 and make it easier for customers to find you vs. your competition.
Brian Cox
President
Dealer Impact Systems
The Power of Satellite Videos, the number one way to drive traffic to your virtual dealership!
Videos provide visual stimulation and an emotional response, however provoking an action from that response only happens when people can find them. Satellite Videos dramatically increase conversion ratios and time on your website, but the general population is not on your website day in and day out.
Dealer Impact believes your website presence should be in as many places as possible, all the time. We all know YouTube is the number one video portal on the internet, so if you export your videos, let’s say 100 for easy math, that is 100 more Points of Presence (POPs) you didn’t have before. The video player comes with an embed code that allows you to integrate these videos anywhere. You can embed them on Facebook pages, eBay, Cars.com, blogs, anywhere.
Each video acts like a satellite in cyberspace, a POP, for people to find you. Place them in popular social media sites or portals where there are hundreds of millions of potential customers giving them a direct link back to your dealership.
Let the power of Satellite Videos put your dealership on the screen of every computer on the planet.
Brian Cox
President
Dealer Impact Systems
Breaking Waves For Marketers To Catch
By Keith Boswell
The Internet marketing landscape has grown rapidly over the past few years, spreading out over the Internet like warm saltwater in the sea. Initially focused on banner advertising and search engine submissions, the environment has grown considerably in terms of tools and sophistication of the techniques that Internet marketers are employing.
Jupiter Media Metrix has spotted a recent shift in advertising/marketing dollars into online channels that deliver less expensive distribution, greater personalization, and higher response and tracking rates than traditional marketing dollars are able to capture.
What is emerging in the online marketing space is part digital marketing and part online advertising. Online advertising is an online marketing model based largely on traditional metrics and thinking. Online advertising learns its lessons from television, print, and radio. Examples of online advertising are banner ads and website/content sponsorships.
Digital marketing is a model based on the possibilities created by tightly networked markets. For example, in the next 24 hours web surfers will search for “used cars” an estimated 36,507 times. Marketers are able to insert themselves into these online markets in ways they never could before (see Keyword Markets to learn more). Even in a world filled with spam, consumers and businesses are finding each other on the Internet in unobtrusive ways.
Companies employing digital marketing tactics are actively working to ensure their customers are getting the best and most relevant information that they need to make purchases. Digital marketing consists of search engine optimization, permission-based email marketing, and online coupons.
Marketers were led into online advertising first because it most matched the traditional marketing channels they were accustomed to and the tools for effective digital marketing didn’t exist yet. Like exploring new coasts with dated maps, it was only a matter of time before those marketing online gained better tools and information to make them more successful.
According to Jupiter, spending in online advertising in the United States grew by only 5 percent in 2001. Once the economy settles down, they expect it to bounce back and grow at a compound rate of 22 percent over the next five years, reaching a total of more than $15 billion by 2006.
During the same time period, Jupiter predicts that spending on digital marketing initiatives such as search engine optimization, e-mail, and coupons will surpass that of advertising and reach more than $19 billion by 2006.
The growth for online marketers will be huge. According to Jupiter’s Internet Advertising Model, by 2006 online advertising and digital marketing will account for 7 percent of the total advertising market, up from 3 percent in 2001.
As marketing online matures, we continue to learn a tremendous amount about how people are conducting themselves online. Traditional models didn’t grasp how powerful combining hyperlinked information and marketing tactics could be.
Driven quickly through hyperlinks to information, context becomes an important factor for success. Varying levels of trust are created depending on where information is found.
Companies must ensure they are being found in search engines in order to attract a captive and interested audience. A study from the NPD Group released in February 2001 found that search listings are more effective than standard banner or button advertisements when it comes to brand recall, favorable opinion rating and inspiring purchases. The study found:
- In unaided recall, search listings outperformed banners and buttons by three to one
- More than twice as many people gave a more favorable opinion of companies in the top three search positions than those featured in ads
- 55 percent of online purchases were made on websites found through search listings
- Only 9 percent of online purchases were on websites found through banner ads
These studies suggest that people are inclined to trust services like search engines much like they trust a librarian, a trust that people would not be lead wrong by those who would choose to lead them. Search engines work because they are a passive tool, awaiting input from the user to find what they want.
Email works because it takes the concept of direct marketing and turns it into an active communication channel driven by valuable information and transactions. Research released from DoubleClick in November 2001, indicates that over 88 percent of online consumers have made a purchase as a result of receiving permission-based email, up from 61 percent last year. The research also found that 37 percent had clicked through an email and purchased immediately, up from 20 percent last year.JCPenney is an example of a company that is using email to drive sales. Between 1998 and 2000, JCPenney’s online sales rose from $15 million to $294 million. JCPenney hasn’t released online sales figures for 2001, but projections were for sales over $400 million. How has the business grown that much? By focusing on targeted email lists from a willing audience of over 4.5 million shoppers. A family with children headed back to school will get promotions that highlight JCPenney’s back to school specials.
A blinking rich media banner ad can’t begin to work that way. It might have relevant information or appeal, but only about one one-thousandth of the time. Banners, in all shapes and formats, live in the desert of the online world like billboards on a lonely stretch of dry, forgotten highway.
Digital marketing, like search engine optimization and email, fills your belly and growls at you because you’re hungry for it. It’s what you want…not what someone perceives you to want. When a person searches on a search engine for a specific product or service, they are qualifying themselves as a potential customer.
Online advertising reminds you that a company has not faded away, sticking to a one-sided, high-frequency push of information it believes will draw people to it like a lighthouse. Digital marketing looks to meet you up on scenic deck #2, where mutual conversations drive transactions and relationships. In a shifting sea of choices, marketers’ budgets will soon reflect where the real money and conversations live.
Cloud Computing and Cars: A Web Services Primer
By Bridget Townsend
Keeping up with shifting technology is an uphill battle when marketing in the automotive vertical. See how web services can help you focus on promotion, rather than your infrastructure.
Web services are not a new invention, but only recently have we seen them gaining acceptance in many industries, including automotive. If you consider the nature of a vehicle, combined with the exploding number of consumers heading online to research and shop for vehicles, this makes sense. Because a vehicle can have over 10,000 options and pricing configurations, ensuring that an automotive selling site has the most up-to-date and accurate information, and that it has the tools that consumers demand (such as allowing consumers to build their own cars by adding options, colors, etc., and then comparing them to other models) is a monumental job. Enter web services.
What web services can do
Before we delve deeper into how web services can benefit a wide range of industries, let’s step back and explain more concretely what they are and what they do. Web services are interfaces that exchange information between an application and a remote data source. They allow software applications to access and use functionality and data created by another provider, or multiple providers. This is an abstract concept, so let’s make it tangible with an example of web services, courtesy of the website XML.com: a music CD. If you want to play a CD, you put it into a CD player and the player plays it for you. The CD player offers a CD playing service. You can replace one CD with another, or take your CDs to a friend’s house and play them on their player. No matter what music is on the CD or what player you use, you can listen to it because the systems talk to each other. This works the same way as web services do. Without web services, every CD would come with its own player and the two would not be separated. This sounds odd, but it’s the way many software systems have been built. In effect, building a software system has been like re-inventing the wheel every time, with all the development time and costs that includes. With that basic definition, let’s circle back to how industries are using web services, and why they would want to. Let’s take Google as an example. Google has popularized web service utilities for businesses and for the general public. Groups ranging from non-profit organizations to book clubs use their Google Groups and Google Docs to share information and stay in touch. Another example is cdyne, which applies web services to a specific domain or demographic. Their demographics web service delivers enhanced census data, which their clients use to target customers or neighborhoods for their own services and products.
Web services for automotive
In the automotive industry, this same concept is applied to a vertical market. Online vehicle shoppers want quick and easy access to the most up-to-date and detailed vehicle data. A vehicle manufacturer or portal site could re-invent the wheel by developing its own configuration and comparison tool to combine raw data with available options, but the creation is time-consuming and requires sophisticated programming skills and constant data updates. Using web services, they create a simple consumer-facing interface and flow data through it from a data provider. They don’t have to create an infrastructure or manage data updates; the provider takes care of that. Every interface is customized for look and feel so every website retains individuality. Check out Vehix.com and Sam’s Club Auto Buying Program for examples. Both use web services to deliver vehicle data, but each interface is customized and unique. And neither company has to worry about updating the data or keeping the service running; the web service provider takes care of that. They’ve increased their capability without having to invest in a new infrastructure, derail their development team or invest in new personnel. Why they work
To continue with the “why” of web services, reduced cost and development time are key. A basic example to illustrate this point: a Microsoft Word document. When you go to write a document, you would never dream of starting by developing your own word processor. Microsoft has already done that, and done it well. They’ve provided the platform and they are responsible for managing it, updating it and releasing new versions. You only have to use it.
Web services follow the same logic. An expert in the space has already developed the platform; customizing it is much cheaper and faster than developing it all over again. Consider the example of cloud computing, which allows developers to exploit functionality without having to implement a full-blown application. Because this practice is cheaper, and because the internet is increasingly more reliable, more companies are adopting this approach. Early adoption within a handful of Fortune 500 companies, including Proctor & Gamble and General Electric, sets the stage for cloud computing to go mainstream. This “cloud” allows companies to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, manage and share data without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Their customers can focus on their core competencies, not the infrastructure.
Another benefit of using an existing web service is access to the innovations of that implementation. As we all know, technology is never static; changes are happening every day and trying to keep up with new functionality can derail a development team from focusing on the core competencies that result in immediate revenue.
As an example from the automotive industry, many companies need to be able to decode vehicle identification numbers (VINs), but they generate revenue by creating consumer-facing websites that help consumers find the their perfect vehicle. They don’t need to build a VIN decoder, they need to buy one. What they’re presenting to the consumer is key, not what is happening on the back-end.
Conclusion
If you are developing websites for your clients, or are tasked with bringing all the providers together who are essential for functionality and deployment, you should consider taking a closer look at web services. By using an off-the-shelf solution and then building on that platform, you can save your clients time to market and significant funds and give them access to groundbreaking innovations. As a result, you have more money left in your budget for marketing and promotion, and your clients can get a head start on generating more revenue.
Bridget Townsend is director of engineering, product and client services for Chrome Systems, Inc.
Web Marketing Grows, but How Much?
JULY 3, 2008
A Look Behind the Numbers
“More than one-half of the average marketer’s budget is now spent online,” according to a press release from lead generation company Clash-Media. The firm conducted its “Online Lead Generation (B2C) Report 2008″ in May with E-consultancy.
But the press release may be a misreading of the report. According to respondents, a greater proportion of lead generation budgets is being spent online (on average, 53%) than offline (44%).
The survey’s methodology seems to confirm the point.
Of those polled, 73% said their channels to market were “online or multichannel,” and 23% said “online only.” Only about 4% said they were “offline only.”
So respondents were focused largely on online approaches. The rest of the summary issued with the report was more accurate. Among the findings:
- Seven out of 10 responding marketers said their companies used search engine optimization, paid search and e-mail marketing to in-house lists.
- Offline marketing methods largely decreased, with only press and television advertising growing. Over 90% of marketers saw online lead generation as a growth area.
- Print media was still the most commonly used offline method to generate consumer leads (65% of organizations).
- Natural search (79% of respondents), e-mail marketing to in-house lists (75%) and paid search (71%) were the three most commonly used online methods for lead generation.
Without question, online ad spending in the US is rising quickly. eMarketer predicts double-digit growth will continue for the next several years.
Auto Ad Spending Down, Except Digital
Double-digit Web ad growth
Automotive advertising spending in the US dropped to $1.99 billion in Q1 2008, according to TNS Media Intelligence. That was down more than 14% compared with Q1 2007.Ad spending is “sinking as fast as new car sales,” said Jon Swallen, senior vice president of research at TNS, in a July 2008 Detroit Free Press interview. Mr. Swallen noted that consumers’ focus on fuel economy has cut into truck sales, which has affected ad spending. “A year ago, for every dollar spent on truck advertising, they spent 80 cents on passenger auto,” he said. “This year, the ratio of truck advertising to car advertising is almost 1-to-1.”
Automakers have traditionally been the biggest advertisers in the country. General Motors is the fourth-largest advertiser in the US, and the company spent $535 million in Q1 2008, according to TNS data cited in a July 2008 Media Life article. GM spent $2.1 billion on ads last year, which was the third year in a row of lower ad spending for the company.
Last year total auto ad spending was down 10.8%, to $12.3 billion, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus data cited in the Detroit Free Press article.
If there is a bright spot in auto ad spending, it is online. Internet spending was up 57.9% last year, to $441.6 million. TNS put GM’s Internet spending alone at more than $212 million (excluding search and online video), 79% over the previous year’s spending.
eMarketer predicts double-digit growth for auto online ad spending through 2012, when it will reach more than $5.61 billion.
Learn how auto marketers are using the Web. Get your copy of eMarketer’s Automotive Marketing Online: Negotiating the Curves report.
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