Online Marketing - The Smart Way of Promoting

Online marketing is one of the rising types of marketing segment to promote products and services in stunning way.  There are many smart ways online media is catching up the audience using different kind of technology to promote the commodities also it has enormous accessibility and reach it is easy to reach millions of users at one go.

Being the modern and hottest field online media advertising has become focus of attention in all the trading and service firms. According to the media experts online marketing mode carries a lot of prospected audience to make business. Also experts think that online media advertising is in game change period and soon it will beat other traditional media of advertising with its reach and sustainability.

The Smart ways of promoting

The sharpen technology discovering many more new systems to make strengthen of online marketing segment. Below are recent trends which are talk of the town in this industry.

1. Real Time Bidding
2. Behavioral Targeting
3. Make the audience busy through Interactive Creatives
4. Mobile App marketing
5. Games on social media channel

Real Time Bidding: This is one of the booming technologies which enable high return of investment to the advertiser. Real time bidding will be a significant factor that can fulfill the promise of online marketing.

As defined by Parks Associates, the automated process of buying and selling online display advertising in real time, and it incorporates enhanced solutions in targeting algorithms and data analytics in order to deliver better targeting, greater control and more granular campaigns.

In general words we can easily compare real time bidding with stocks market and its operations, but whatever transactions happed in RTB is approximately o.6 seconds.  Once advertisement wins the bid for desired inventory it will start serving to the right audience at the right time. Even still lot more improvements are going on to develop this system and track the accurate data at real time. As predicted in 2012, by this yearend real time bidding is most game changing segment in online marketing.

Using Real Time Bidding, Facebook advertising exchange is assuring the conversions within 2 days to its advertisers and it is working in that advertising exchange with abundance of audience, targeting based on geographical, demographical and behavioral factors.

Behavioral Targeting: This is one of the major parameter that online media used to target the right advertisement to the right customer to get business done within estimated time.  These technologies assess user behavior through user’s activity on World Wide Web.  This technology tracking through user’s IP address and personal information which user has submitted while transacting something else on the web.  Through this user data, various types of the advertisement will target to the respective customers based on their behavior and demographical factors.

Through behavior targeting most of the online media networks retargeting the interested customers through a variety of offers and discounts. Also many data management companies will analyze this data and segmenting the data as per the behavior of a particular customer.

Make the audience busy through Interactive Creatives:  As technology develops, online media is also implementing new techniques to attract the customers towards its products or services. Now most of the displayed creatives which have eye catchy look, color, articles on ads, videos, offers, discounts and many more to attract the customer’s attention from its first impression.

These interactive creatives have all the features in single creatives and this leads customer busy with one of their pages or its services. Also through this kind of the creative we can track user’s activity in each and every second and over again using this data, advertiser can target those audiences for their new products or services.

Mobile App Marketing: Now a day’s most of all are using smart phones and through mobiles we are engaged on many social networks, e commerce services, personal email conversations and chats applications.  These applications will capture potential data of the respective customer and track their activities on web.  Through these kinds of the interactive applications, marketers will target their desired audience to promote the services to its desired pool of customers.

Advertisers are following their own strategies to stay at the top of the game using these mobile apps.  Few are listed as these are recent trends in 2013.

• Retargeting and Real time bidding using mobile apps - Every successful mobile marketing campaign starts with successfully targeting those who will prove most beneficial towards the product or services.  The recent introduction of Apple's Advertising Identifier is helping to develop more complicated real-time bidding and retargeting technology, including the ability to exclusively target the inactive users in an effort to reengage through mobile apps and making other marketers jealous in the process.

Real-time bidding is truly a win-win for the mobile advertising industry, giving buyers more access and transparency while concurrently giving sellers a market-driven fair price.

Frequency of tracking -   This is one of the high debated topics across the industry and still it is going on in this year with lot of facts and figures. Using Unique Device Identifier (UDID) advertiser can track the activities of user. It is one or the other way helpful to understand the user behavior and expectations to optimize the app for stand on the top of the market. AdTruth is also announced a partnership with OpenX Softwares on their new venture to develop Unique Device Identifier technology in Jan 2013.

Advanced data capture about users – From past few years, many industries have squeezed the power of data and now the mobile marketing industry is taking notice and recognizing its value. The possibilities of discoveries using data are endless. Thousands, millions, and billions of data points provide mobile app marketers with a wealth of knowledge on user behavior that was not previously available.

New mobile user behavior: As we discussed above mobile marketing is also booming with other form of online marketing and we can also easily track the behavior of the particular user and potential of customer to promote feasible product.

In TradeMob, we are predicting a change in user structure and behavior in 2013. Due to competition in the tablet and smart phone market increases, service providers inevitably become more accessible and affordable to a larger cross-section of demographics, including less affluent and increasingly younger users.

According to eMarketer, introduction of new tablets like iPad Mini, the number of tablet users is expected to see explosive growth and it is reaching nearly 34 million (in 2011) to 70 million in this year.

Games on Social media channel: Social gaming started in middle of 2007 and officially introduced on Facebook platform.  Since then, Facebook grown from 27 million to 500 million unique visitors and over 70% visitors are engaging with social gaming on various social media networks.

Through these gaming apps advertisers can attract the premium customer especially they will target youth segment of customers to promote their lifestyle, entertainment, sports related merchandise and accessories to the targeted audience. Social media has implemented three methods for driving social games, such as premium placements, ongoing promotions, and viral notification channels from these three methods social media networks attracts daily active users to make revenue out of these games.

Conclusion: Online marketing segment is one of the terrifically growing domains for many uses. As fast as technology develops this domain is also developing in its own sizzling way.  This is the major reason that we all can see online advertising inventories on each and every piece of the web page and it’s just like a popular marketing place put any product or services in front of the right audience at right time also there is no geographical barriers to promote any of the services at any time without any hassles.

Source: http://goo.gl/hXA4s 

Features of Real Time Bidding (RTB) Platform

Social Media Marketing Trends

Social media marketing disappears

Social media is going to be integral part of everything we do when promoting our business. This will make social media an integral part of marketing and it will not be a separate activity. Much like SEO or email marketing, social media will be just one tool in the box.

Integrating social media to corporate websites

Brands start large scale integration of social media content into their digital properties. Big brands will use social media connect and user generated content to get closer to customers. This will help them get most out of true fans and brand advocates by linking their web properties to conversations.

More support through social media

The integration of social media will lead to people reporting their problems in their channel of choice. Social media integration lets some of those problems be handled by the peers. However, companies should find ways to avoid their social media channels becoming a glorified helpdesk.

Social CRM will make inroads in larger organizations

Social data will be added to the CRM systems to find trends in sentiment and individual preferences of customers. The goal is to engage the customer in a conversation and give value that binds them tighter to the brand. As brands lose control of online interaction social CRM will help them react and predict how conversations are taking place. Findings from IBM showed that in the next three to five years, 81% plan to focus on customer analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Social media will influence more sales

Social media integration will allow customers to get real user opinions before making purchase decisions. Social commerce is not web shop on Facebook. It’s a digital property where people can make their decision based on marketing materials from the brand and augmented with feedback from existing customers in a form of ratings, reviews and comments.

Social commerce on mobile devices

We will lead into a new era in eCommerce where you can directly purchase from your Facebook account. With proliferation of mobile platforms social commerce will become popular on mobile devices. Facebook’s Open Graph will also let you directly purchase with Facebook credits based on recommendations by your friends.

Social media budgets will grow

Most companies will increase their social media budgets. This includes in-house spending on and outsourced services and part of the investments go to boost their own social presence through blogs and product reviews. Rest goes to external sites like Facebook.

Social media advertising will grow

Social media channels are looking to turn a profit so they are looking for ways to get at your advertising budget. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others are looking into way to display more marketing messages to their users. This will increase budgets dedicated to social media advertising.

Social media advertising will grow to $5 Billion in 2012, 25% of that vill be locally targeted social advertising.

Social media ROI is a must

More result oriented. Still less than half of the marketer’s measure results from social media. Social media ROI is a hot topic but less than half of the marketers report seeing it. We see that the budgets will grow and social gets more important in the brand’s marketing mix. This means that C-level will demand results. Dollars in sales - It can be as easy as direct sales from Facebook or a bit more vague as in conversion rate of people from social channels is higher than average.

In the course of our conversations with CMOs worldwide, an overwhelming consensus emerged. The vast majority of CMOs believe there are three key areas for improvement. They must understand and deliver value to empowered customers; create lasting relationships with those customers; and measure marketing’s contribution to the business in relevant, quantifiable terms.

Rise of the branded content

Next to advertising there will be a push be in the user’s stream. This means brands need to create content that is good enough to be curetted and shared. Content has longer shelf life, can be reused in different channels, and has higher perceived value for customers. This means that content creation budgets may in many cases exceed the social advertising budgets. It wouldn’t be surprising if some brands will kill advertising in favor of content creation.

Content Curation and Discovery

Information explosion has created an attention deficit and people want to have a quick overview of what’s important and easily find what they need. Aggregation and content curation are going to be very important and brands start filtering information to give value to their customers. Brands will integrate curation into their IT or use third party services. News aggregation apps like Flipboard and magazine apps will find a market in corporate circles.

Tabletizing and mobilizing websites

Not exactly a social media thing but businesses start to make their sites mobile. Like 10 years ago companies made websites because everybody else did; now they will make their sites mobile because everybody else does. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. (Webmail providers should be worried).

Social gaming will grow and spill over to real world

Social Media Games have more players than prime time TV shows have viewers. In-game ads and branded game items will become important promotional tools. As social media will become more mobile so will social gaming. This means that games that are hosted on social networks, such as Zynga and EA on Facebook, will be playable on mobile devices. 

These kinds of games will be played on-the-go – when you’re traveling by bus, sitting in a boring lecture, waiting for your lunch. Social gaming will be integrated with real life to physically perform tasks offline that have effect in the virtual world. Engage real friends; go to locations, flash mobs, etc. The potential growth of mobile social gaming will be huge.

Location! Location! Location!

Location based services will be everywhere. The Local information, reviews, coupons, loyalty programs and more all tied in with your social graph. We are moving towards an era of real-time need for information. More and more people will be checking for recommendations about nearby restaurants, bars, hotels, etc. Location based services will be part of many marketing campaigns. Near-field communication chips in mobile devices get more common and will pave the way to the new era of “tap & pay” commerce. Loyalty programs will start moving towards NFC and location based solutions. NFC will be a convenient way for you to connect, share and react.

Most social media usage will be on mobile devices

Social media is happening in real time and people share content when it’s happening! As smart phone penetrations reaches majority and tablets become increasingly popular, sharing content will move towards mobile devices. Smart phones give us extra depth into personalization – we can share what we want, when we want. The limits are fading! You will always be connected with social media, no matter where you are!

Group buying sites will add location based services

Let’s face it, it is a brain dead model. Grow a huge list by offering really cheap deals and then sell that list to businesses to get really cheap deals. Group buying will not go away but businesses will understand better what it is and use it accordingly. To spell it out: businesses buy an opportunity to let potential customers sample their offering at a hugely discounted rate in hopes of repeat business. New layer of value can be added by integrating with location based services that will alert users to deals when they are in the neighborhood.

Interacting with live TV in social media

Live TV shows will react to user interactions such as votes, suggestions, etc. We have the ability to change what’s happening by providing real-time feedback on social networks. TV is going to be everywhere through mobile apps.

News will be social

News websites will gradually be replaced by applications integrated with social media technology such as Facebook’s Open Graph. While this won’t happen instantly, we’re going down that road as we speak. People will be reading news from their dedicated applications such as iPad’s Flipboard or Washington Post Social Reader.

Mobile apps will become more social

All of the successful new mobile apps will be deeply integrated with social networks allowing you to share and engage more than ever before. We will be taking in a lot of suggestions and recommendations from our friends, colleagues and other trustworthy peers.

Your social media footprint will grow

Frictionless sharing capabilities and social gestures will make our lives increasingly visible on social networking sites. Music, TV shows, check-ins, purchases and more will be automatically posted to social media sites. Always connected, always sharing! If you don’t share, your friends will. Some may raise privacy concerns but most people will ignore the implications and their lives are going to be more open than ever before.

Facebook will break the 1 Billion people mark

Where do those more than 1 billion Facebook users come from? The countries with more than 20 million people and Facebook penetration below 20% will add most of this growth in 2012. Add the potential growth of other countries and you get to a cool billion or 1.1 billion even. And that does not include China.

Source: www.dreamgrow.com

Mobile advertising – An Overview

Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing.

Overview

Some mobile advertising as closely related to online or internet advertising, though its reach is far greater - currently, most mobile advertising is targeted at mobile phones, that came estimably to a global total of 4.6 billion as of 2009. Notably computers, including desktops and laptops, are currently estimated at 1.1 billion globally.

It is probable that advertisers and media industry will increasingly take account of a bigger and fast-growing mobile market, though it remains at around 1% of global advertising spent. Mobile media is evolving rapidly and while mobile phones will continue to be the mainstay, it is not clear whether mobile phones based on cellular backhaul or smartphones based on WiFi hot spot or WiMAX hot zone will also strengthen. However, such is the emergence of this form of advertising, that there is now a dedicated global awards ceremony organized every year by Visiongain.

As mobile phones outnumber TV sets by over 3 to 1 and PC based internet users by over 4 to 1and the total laptop and desktop PC population by nearly 5 to 1advertisers in many markets have recently rushed to this media. In Spain 75% of mobile phone owners receive ads, in France 62%and in Japan 54%. More remarkably as mobile advertising matures, like in the most advanced markets, the user involvement also matures. In Japan today, already 44% of mobile phone owners click on ads they receive on their phones. Mobile advertising was worth 900 million dollars in Japan alone. According to the research firm Berg Insight the global mobile advertising market that was estimated to € 1 billion in 2008. 

Furthermore, Berg Insight forecasts the global mobile advertising market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 43 percent to € 8.7 billion in 2014.

Types of mobile ads

In some markets, this type of advertising is most commonly seen as a Mobile Web Banner (top of page) or Mobile Web Poster (bottom of page banner), while in others, it is dominated by SMS advertising (which has been estimated at over 90% of mobile marketing revenue worldwide). Other forms include MMS advertising, advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, during mobile TV receipt, full-screen interstitials, which appear while a requested item of mobile content or mobile web page is loading up, and audio advertisements that can take the form of a jingle before a voicemail recording, or an audio recording played while interacting with a telephone-based service such as movie ticketing or directory assistance.

The Mobile Marketing Association and the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) has published mobile advertising guidelines, but it is difficult to keep such guidelines current in such a fast-developing area.

The effectiveness of a mobile media ad campaign can be measured in a variety of ways. The main measurements are impressions (views) and click-through rates. They are also sold to advertisers by views (Cost Per Impression) or by click-through (Cost Per Click). Additional measurements include conversion rates, such as click-to-call rates and other degrees of interactive measurement.

Mobile media can run on a mobile web page or within a mobile application, often referred to as in-App.

Mobile Rich Media

In addition to standard mobile display banners, a growing trend is to include rich media execution within the banner ads. This includes banners that would expand to a larger size, offering advertisers a larger display to communicate their message. Most of the Ads have games within the banner to make the experience of more interactive or a video within the banner space.

There are limitations rich media on mobile because all of the coding must be done in HTML5, since the iOS does not support flash.

Handsets display and corresponding ad images

There are hundreds of handsets in the market and they differ by screen size and supported technologies (e.g. MMS, WAP 2.0). For color images, formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF and BMP are typically supported, along with the monochrome WBMP format. 

History of Mobile

Martin Cooper invented a portable handset in 1973, when he was a project manager at Motorola. It was almost three decades after the idea of cellular communications was introduced by Bell Laboratories. Two decades later, cellular phones made a commercial debut in the mass market in the early 1990s. In the early days of cellular handsets, phone functionality was limited to dialing, and voice input/output.

When the second generation of mobile telecoms (so-called 2G) was introduced in Finland by Radiolinja (now Elisa) on the GSM standard (now the world's most common mobile technology with over 2 billion users) in 1991, the digital technology introduced data services. SMS text messaging was the first such service. The first person-to-person SMS text message was sent in Finland in December 1994. SMS (Short Message Service) gradually began to grow, becoming the largest data service by number of users in the world, currently with 74% of all mobile subscribers or 2.4 billion people active users of SMS in 2007.

One advantage of SMS is that while even in conference, users are able to send and receive brief messages unobtrusively, while enjoying privacy. Even in such environments as in a restaurant, café, bank, travel agency office, and so on, the users can enjoy some privacy by sending/receiving brief text messages in an unobtrusive way.

It would take six years from the launch of SMS until the first case of advertising would appear on this new data media channel, when a Finnish news provider offered free news headlines via SMS, sponsored by advertising. This led to rapid experimentation in mobile advertising and mobile marketing, and the world's first conference to discuss mobile advertising was held in London in 2000, sponsored by the Wireless Marketing Association (which later merged into the Mobile Marketing Association). 

The first books to discuss mobile advertising were Ahonen's M-Profits and Haig's Mobile Marketing in 2002. Several major mobile operators around the world launched their own mobile advertising arms, like Aircross in South Korea, owned by the parents of SK Telecoms the biggest mobile operator, or like D2 Communications in Japan, the joint venture of Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and Dentsu, Japan's largest ad agency.

Mobile as Media

This unremarkable two-way communications caught the attention of media industry and advertisers as well as cellphone makers and telecom operators. Eventually, SMS became a new media - called the “seventh mass media channel” by several media and mobile experts - and even more, it is a two-way mobile media, as opposed to one-way immobile media like radios, newspapers and TV. Besides, the immediacy of responsiveness in this two-way media is a new territory found for media industry and advertisers, who are eager to measure up market response immediately. 

Additionally, the possibility of fast delivery of the messages and the ubiquity of the technology (it does not require any additional functionality from the mobile phone, all devices available today are capable of receiving SMS), make it ideal for time- and location-sensitive advertising, such as customer loyalty offers (ex. shopping centres, large brand stores), SMS promotions of events, etc. To leverage this strength of SMS advertising, timely and reliable delivery of messages is paramount, which is guaranteed by some SMS gateway providers.

Mobile media has begun to draw more significant attention from media giants and advertising industry since the mid-2000s, based on a view that mobile media was to change the way advertisements were made, and that mobile devices can form a new media sector. Despite this, revenues are still a small fraction of the advertising industry as a whole but are most certainly on the rise. Informa reported that mobile advertising in 2007 was worth $2.2 billion. This is less than 0.5% of the approximately $450 billion global advertising industry.

Types of mobile advertising are expected to change rapidly. In other words, mobile technology will come up with a strong push for identifying newer and unheard-of mobile multimedia, with the result that subsequent media migration will greatly stimulate a consumer behavioral shift and establish a paradigm shift in mobile advertising. A major media migration is on, as desktop Internet evolves into mobile Internet. One typical case in point is Nielsen’s recent buyout of Telephia.

However it should be kept in mind that the rapid change in the technology used by mobile advertisers can also have adverse effect to the number of consumers being reached by the mobile advertisements, due to technical limitations of their mobile devices. Because of that, campaigns that aim to achieve wide response or are targeting lower income groups might be better off relying on older, more widespread mobile advertising technologies, such as SMS.

Viral marketing

As mobile is an interactive mass media similar to the internet, advertisers are eager to utilize and make use of viral marketing methods, by which one recipient of an advertisement on mobile, will forward that to a friend. This allows users to become part of the advertising experience. 

At the bare minimum mobile ads with viral abilities can become powerful interactive campaigns. At the extreme, they can become engagement marketing experiences. A key element of mobile marketing campaigns is the most influential member of any target audience or community, which is called the alpha user.

Interactivity

Mobile devices aim to outgrow the domain of voice-intensive cellphones and to enter a new world of multimedia mobile devices, like laptops, PDA phones and smartphones. Unlike the conventional one-way media like TV, radio and newspaper, web media has enabled two-way traffic, thereby introducing a new phase of interactive advertising, regardless of whether static or mobile. 

This user-centric approach was noted at the 96th annual conference of Association of National Advertisers in 2006, which described” a need to replace decade’s worth of top-down marketing tactics with bottom-up, grass-roots approaches”. Many use 2d bar codes to make offline print material more interactive with their mobile device. This has been proven to be successful in Japan, UK, and Philippines and has been catching on in Northern America.

List of mobile advertising networks

This is a list of notable global mobile advertising networks. Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing. An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to web sites that want to host advertisements.

admob (acquired by Google), Adfonic , Adwhirl, Airpush, Appington, AppLift, Buzz-City, Enpocket (acquired by Nokia), Greystripe (acquired by ValueClick), iAds (previously Quattro, acquired by Apple Inc.), inMobi, inneractive, JumpTap, LeadBolt, MadHouse, madvertise, Millennial Media, Mobclix (acquired by Velti), MobFox, Mobhero, Mojiva, MoPub, MSN Ad Network, Tapclix, Vserv, xAd

Mobile device issues

Coincidentally, however, mobile devices are encountering technological bottlenecks in terms of battery life, formats, and safety issue

In a broad sense, mobile devices are categorically broken down into portable and stationary equipment. Technically, mobile devices are categorized as below:

• Handheld [portable]
• Laptop, including ultraportable [portable]
• Dashtop, including GPS navigation, satellite radio, and WiMAX-enabled dashtop mobile payment platforms[fixed on dashboards]

The battery life and safety issues will perhaps combine to eventually push mobile equipment’s inroads into vehicle dashtops. However, satellite-based GPS navigation and satellite radio may already hit a snag because of their part-time usage and technological hierarchy. Put differently, people want more functions than GPS navigation and satellite radios. 

The trend indicates an ongoing convergence into all-in-one dashtop mobile devices incorporating GPS navigators, satellite radios, MP3 players, mobile TV, mobile Internet, MVDER (vehicle black box), driving safety monitors, smartphones and even video games.

Source: en.wikipedia.org 

Types of Display Advertising

The large majority of online advertising has a cost that is brought about by usage or interaction of an ad; there are a few other methods of advertising online that only require a onetime payment. The Million Dollar Homepage is a very successful example of this. Visitors were able to pay $1 per pixel of advertising space and their advert would remain on the homepage for as long as the website exists with no extra costs.

Below are the major types of display advertising;

Floating ad: An ad which moves across the user's screen or floats above the content.

Expanding ad: An ad which changes size and which may alter the contents of the webpage.

Polite ad: A method by which a large ad will be downloaded in smaller pieces to minimize the disruption of the content being viewed

Wallpaper ad: An ad which changes the background of the page being viewed.

Trick banner: A banner ad that looks like a dialog box with buttons. It simulates an error message or an alert.

Pop-up: A new window which opens in front of the current one, displaying an advertisement, or entire webpage.

Pop-under: Similar to a Pop-Up except that the window is loaded or sent behind the current window so that the user does not see it until they close one or more active windows.

Video ad: similar to a banner ad, except that instead of a static or animated image, actual moving video clips are displayed. This is the kind of advertising most prominent in television, and many advertisers will use the same clips for both television and online advertising.

Map ad: text or graphics linked from, and appearing in or over, a location on an electronic map such as on Google Maps.

Mobile ad: an SMS text or multi-media message sent to a cell phone.

Superstitial: An animated adv on a Web page from Enliven Marketing Technologies. It uses video, 3D content or Flash to provide a TV-like advertisement. Used to be known as Unicast Transitional ads as they were originally made by Unicast Communications but the company was acquired by Viewpoint Corporation in 2004, which then changed its name to Enliven in 2008.

Interstitial ad: a full-page ad that appears before a user reaches their original destination.

In addition, ads containing streaming video or streaming audio are becoming very popular with advertisers.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Trends in Online Advertising

Following up on the Top 10 Tech Trends Of The Decade and drilling down on trend item five, in this post we’re going to look at the evolution of online advertising and what we might expect to see in the coming decade. At present, the online advertising industry is at $55 billion, and mobile advertising is at $2 billion. With the rise of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, mobile advertising will gain momentum.

Below are the top ten trends;

1. Paid Search Rules:

Google ruled the past decade with paid search advertising. There is still no better, more effective form of advertising on the Internet. Keywords are becoming expensive, but if you know what you are doing, you will still be able to find cost-effective ways of acquiring customers using PPC.

2. Organic Search Gains Momentum:

Increasingly though, marketers are starting to understand the importance of organic search. Almost 90% of the entire Web’s search traffic flows through organic search, yet the search marketing industry are generally obsessed with PPC. This decade, some sanity and rationalization will take the place of this weird dichotomy.

3. Display Advertising and Vertical Ad Networks:

The best trend I have spotted during the past decade is the rise of vertical ad networks like Glam Media, Federated, HotChalk, Travel Ad Network, and others that focus on specific verticals. This is pretty much the only way for advertisers to do brand advertising across the fragmented spectrum of blogs and other online hangouts for audiences, including social media. In the coming decade, vertical ad networks will get better at providing more value to advertisers through advanced technology for audit, measurement, analytics and optimization, as well as richer engagement capabilities like interactive and video ads.

4. Social Media Advertising:

Social networks, especially the big ones like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, have a lot of information about individuals. They have not yet figured out ways to monetize this information and create a safe, non-intrusive, yet personalized framework through which advertisers can do high-precision targeting. This is definitely coming in the next few years.

5. In-Game Advertising:

Consumers are spending excessive amounts of time online playing games. We foresee a significant uptick in in-game advertising this decade.

6. Advertising Apps and Games:

Now that apps have taken over the mobile web, and is even coming on to PCs, advertising apps and games are a natural progression. Marketers will see it is obvious that instead of a 30-second prime-time advertising slot, a branded app or game that can engage users for three minutes is a far better use of ad dollars.

7. Interactive Infomercials:

Television infomercials are an effective way to market products. But the Internet offers significantly more cost-effective and targeted ways to market using the same concept, but delivered through display ad networks, viral videos, and so on.

8. Video Advertising:

Whether they are about political campaigns or consumer brands, YouTube videos have a viral power, and everyone knows it. This decade, we will see a huge amount of creativity deployed on this art form.

9. Mobile Advertising:

The rise of the mobile Web – through mobile apps on smart phones and tablets in the West, and through the avalanche of cell phone adoption in the emerging markets from Brazil to Indonesia – opens the door for mobile advertising as a category to gain tremendous momentum this decade. In particular, location-based advertising, coupons, and special offers at highly targeted and precise moments – all look very promising.

10. Better Analytics, Optimization, and Targeting:

Powering all this and more, we will see a vastly more sophisticated analytics, optimization, and targeting infrastructure that doesn’t quite exist today. There will be innovation in affordable tools to optimize PPC, SEO, mobile advertising, social media advertising, and every other conceivable online customer acquisition method.

Source: www.sramanamitra.com