Internet Marketing Growth

Forrester’s predicts growth in all areas of internet marketing with the most pronounced increases coming from Social and Mobile.  (Here’s the link)

Thoughts:

• More funds will be directed to online but keep in mind that over 80% will still be put towards “traditional”.  What these top line numbers don’t show is how “Traditional” will merge with “Interactive” over the next few years.
• Social Media is predicted to grow the most over the next few years.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves as Facebook and the others look to develop revenue models.
• Search is king.  Why?  Because Interactive marketing works best for direct response efforts and search marketing is the king of direct response.  As marketers we need to understand when to use which tool and don’t try to shoehorn objectives into unsuited tactics.

The Google Killers

There are some interesting things happening in the search space that won’t affect marketers immediately but will eventually change the way we search online.  And changing the way we search will have profound effects on Search marketing.

Google makes over $20B a year selling ads in search results.  Each time you search Google for “Tennis Rackets” the engine will list what the Google algorithm believes is the best results then list a bunch of text ads down the right side.  Now if the search results provided exactly what you were looking for there would never be a need to click on the ads — and if you don’t click on the ads Google doesn’t make money.  Therefore, Google makes money on ads that are compelling only because the actual search results didn’t return what the searcher was looking for!

Google doesn’t make this obvious.  They play a precarious game of providing just enough quality in their returns but not enough to make the ads useless. Google is not interested in making the perfect search engine — if it did it would not have a revenue stream.

But here comes the competition.  If Google is not going to improve the competition will.  The question is will they be good enough to unseat the reining king.  It’s happened before.  Remember Alta Vista?  Here are some new engines to check out:

BING.com – this is Microsoft’s new “Decision Engine”.  It looks like a reskinned MSN to me.  What’s important here is the concept of “Decision Engine”.  This new take on search sets a new bar for Google to meet.

Hunch.com – Go check this out right now!  This new engine is actually bringing the “Decision Engine” concept to reality.   Tell the engine about yourself and get personalized results.

Wolfram Alpha – If your looking for facts this engine servers them up.  Most of my searches are looking for data points.  Something that Google is absolutely terrible at.  From now on I’m using Wolfram when I need to know the population of Ohio or how large the moon is.

This post was a bit different than normal.  There is no immediate opportunity for marketers.  But keep and eye on this space.  Search is starting to change and when it does Search Marketing will also radically change.