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SEO Trends - Seven Online Marketing Service and Advertising Trends for 2005
Ad Spending Up for Online Marketing Services
Atlanta advertising and online marketing services report that business clients are spending more on online marketing and web advertising, a trend that started last year. Neil Reynolds is President of The Ad Shop, an online marketing service which handles banking, automotive, restaurant and mainly B2B online marketing. The Ad Shop did about 30 more websites in 2004 compared to the previous year.
Gina Arbore, Senior Designer at online marketing service Adrenaline, says that client advertising spending is increasing, so much that it's tough to find designers who excel. Nonetheless Adrenaline, which has done full service work for Nike, Home Depot and Atlanta Food Bank, hired 2 designers at the end of 2004 to meet the increased demand for online marketing services.
Pay Per Click Advertising and Keyword Costs Increasing
Pay per click ads continue to grow in popularity for retail advertising. Erica Schultz is a Senior Media Planner at Breathe Interactive, the online marketing division of ad agency West Wayne, and led the media team for the Bellsouth campaign. "I don't always buy PPC, it depends on your objectives. Almost all campaigns are integrated with interactive advertising for a well rounded campaign," says Schultz.
PPC or search engine marketing may not matter for a commodity like orange juice, but for DSL modem service, search engine marketing matters. Buying paid placement ads is expensive, because every one is fighting for 1st page on the Search engine results. Especially for hot segments like DSL modems and cell phones, the trend is for high demand for related keywords to drive prices ever higher. Schultz also believes that behavioral advertising will grow in 2005 as online advertising gains the ability to feed ads to each web user based on their previous actions online. She points out that the Atlanta Journal Constitution was recently using the Yahoo program that tracks your online behavior. If you click on pet supplies online, then sports, then classified ads; for the next couple weeks they would send ads related to pets to you. These programs can also send relevant banners related to your customer's demographics and behavior.
Advertising Agencies Gaining Online Marketing Services and Search Engine Marketing Capability
Search engine marketing will continue to be a hot online marketing service trend in 2005 after accelerating in 2004. The Google IPO and Google desktop search in late 2004 put search firmly in the public eye. More advertising firms began to develop online marketing services in-house, hired search engine optimization consultants or acquired search marketing firms.
July 2004: Digital Impact, a California provider of online marketing services, acquired Marketleap, a San Francisco-based Internet firm providing search engine marketing services for clients such as Kaiser Permanente, Primedia, SBC's SMARTpages.com and Tyco Electronics
June 2004: DoubleClick Inc, a leading provider of online marketing services for advertising agencies and web publishers, acquired Performics Inc., a search engine marketing and affiliate marketing company based in Chicago.
December 2004: UK based media communications conglomerate Aegis Group acquired Massachussetts based iProspect, for its search engine marketing capabilities. Sarah Fay, president of Aegis's online marketing services, explained that search marketing represents 30% of online advertising in the US.
January 2005: London based WPP Group outlined plans to dominate the global search engine marketing sector with the launch of a new network with 47 online marketing service offices worldwide. The new mSearch agency will manage pay-per-click advertising and bids for keywords, as well as natural search optimization.
Web Advertisers Know That Customers Who Can't Find Them On Search Engines, Can't Find Their Website
Moira Vetter, VP of Account strategy at Atlanta's Merge Inc. sees that her clients also have an increased awareness of search engine marketing as a vital part of online marketing. "Our B2B customers have all brought up search in the last year. Search emphasis may not be a significant revenue stream for B2B advertisers, but if someone can't find you on the search engine then they won't find your web site," says Vetter. Online consumers are drowning in too much information and too many competing businesses on the web. Its natural for businesses and consumers to use search marketing to break through the clutter of online marketing.
Jean Cobb, VP and Account Director at Freebairn and Co, points
out that they rely more on optimization than on search engine
marketing. Most of their clients are B2B and too specific to
benefit from paid key words on search engines. They have had
good success in gaining highly ranked placements through search
engine optimization.
Pay Per Click Versus Organic Search Optimization
MaxMedia Design does a mix of Pay Per Click and organic search engine marketing. Don Berg, Executive VP of Marketing, believes that for the short term and with Flash promotions, PPC is a good way to guarantee top placement quickly. For the long run, however, organic results that come as a result of an optimized content rich site is the best bet in online marketing.
The Trend Away From Flash Heavy Sites and Towards Keyword Text
Don Berg says "Some clients demand a Flash heavy site to get their message across with visuals and sound, which doesn't provide the opportunity to build a spider friendly site. Others realize the benefit of providing a lot of keyword rich HTML text to get indexed with the search engines".
Jean Cobb at Fairburn agrees that there is a trend away from Flash and graphics heavy sites. Now words are text instead of pictures. The words as pictures were popular because they look great but search engines like Google and Yahoo can't find them. The use of text on client web sites in the place of images has helped to yield higher search engine placement for clients. Most of the online marketing services that we spoke with mentioned the trend away from FLASH in web sites.
Adrenaline Senior Designer Gina Arbore believes that Flash based sites can be used if the Flash graphics are a small part loaded into HTML pages that contain mostly text. Optimizing for search involves inserting the same keywords into the HTML web pages, that customers use for a Google search.
Moira Vetter of online marketing service Merge points out that Merge uses Atlanta consultants for search engine optimization. The trend now is less pages and more content. Your web site is no good if no one can find it. Merge does re-writing of the site content to use customer friendly terms. Businesses tend to use too much technical speak. For collateral and web copy you need to stress features and benefits. Talking about solutions to a problem shows business clients that your online marketing service understands their problem from their view.
Advertising Campaigns That Integrate Online Marketing Services With Traditional Advertising Media
Vetter says, "We've been combining direct mail, white papers, online related to print, and online communities. People have always used various media. It's more targeted about where the online marketing appears. People are looking more closely at if they can reach their customer when they go to an online HR community. Online advertising is more specific now, so you can catch your B2B prospect in the right frame of mind to buy." Most of the Atlanta agencies agree with the trend for most campaigns to combine online marketing services and traditional media.
Copyright 2005 Edward R. Hill |
