The future of Internet Business

Marketing is in a hell lot of confusion than before. Initially, Internet marketing was all about beautiful banner ads on the most popular websites. The higher the traffic of the website, the higher the visibility of the Ads. Publisher ruled the market with their fixed banner ad pricing.

Social Brand Management is the future of Internet Business
Posted on August 31st, 2010 deep 3 comments
Internet marketing is in a hell lot of confusion than before. Initially, Internet marketing was all about beautiful banner ads on the most popular websites. The higher the traffic of the website, the higher the visibility of the Ads. Publisher ruled the market with their fixed banner ad pricing.

Then came the search engine which gave advertisers an alternative and cheaper path. Now advertiser could bid for the keyword terms and get their banner displayed according. Things changed upside down when Google brought their effective search engine advertising platform with advance algorithms.

In Google, you just had to bid for the keywords and Google would take care for publishing your non-intrusive ad over the internet. This revolutionized the advertising space in the Internet. Doubtful market was immediately transformed to one of the biggest business model of the Internet.

But along with the advancement of the internet and email system, there were more innovation like Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click ads, Paid review on online news and so on. Currently, these fields are defined and has been thoroughly researched.


Source : coursesandcareer.com
Social Media entered into the space when we had things like active forums and blogs where people spent their time in conversation. Till today, forum is considered the strongest channel to influence people. Blogs are also making their way to becoming influential at presenting ideas. Along with forums and blogs, social networking sites like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious are rising as a influential platform.

Today defining your Internet marketing plan is bit tricky. Though we already have a pre-defined steps for search engine optimization, email marketing and other Google Adsense stuff, the space of social media marketing remains un-defined and open for categorization. But don’t let that deter you.

Social Media has not only brought revolution in the space but has also challenged the traditional marketing fundamentals of the Internet. Many marketing specialist say that banner ads are the things of the past and in-content advertising is the future.

In order to understand better, we need to look at the behavioral change in consumers. Data shows that mobiles devices is soon taking over PC as a consumer device. This also means less activities in web and more in mobile applications and mobile apps. Today every business is targeting for mobile applications because there is an opportunities. These new devices have changes user’s behavior.

People spend their time in sites like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Youtube and read blogs and comments all the day. People are listening and consuming digital content more than before. Further, they have become resilient to the banner advertisement.

Today successful advertisement is not banner ads but social media campaigns. If you search for top internet campaigns they will include sites like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. The main idea is to mobilize crowd and lead them. This means that we are back to the stone age where advertising meant influencing the crowd and creating communities. By stone age, I meant to say we are back to our fundamentals.

Community is the fundamental idea behind the new age marketing. But how do you create community? Unlike other internet marketing where things are automated, Social Media requires involvement and deep engagement with the consumer. NO WAY is banner going to work. You have to engage and influence.

For influencing in the social media, we have things like quizzes, games and so on. Today’s social media framework allows advertisers to use different tools to engage with consumer and this is one of the most effective way of doing it. Engagement doesn’t mean intruding but instead it means welcoming.

Today market is involving and we are seeing many tools being built. I believe that brand management is something that is going to hit big time because it solves the problem for brands to create campaigns and engage with users.

So next time, you are thinking about your Online Marketing, make consumer engagement your priority.

Best regards
Martin Crawford