The futures bright… the Futures digital

February 18th, 2008

There has been a lot written recently about marketing, in particularly the future, and the ongoing growth of digital as a fundamental part of the marketing mix. A flux of articles particularly have suggested that with the economic slowdown will come a further influx of marketing spend into digital, given the highly competitive ROI the channel offers.

In particular Search and Affiliate Marketing activity continue to thrive, with many suggesting Affiliate Marketing to continue its steady growth. Affiliate Marketing has come a long way since I was working on Tradedoubler accounts for a large PC manfacturer. Nowadays, it intersects many verticals, offering advertisers a very cost effective solution, whilst at the same time, not neccesarily associating them with the same level of risk as far as ROI is concerned as other channels such as Behavioural.

Search activity also continues to flourish, however it is SEO that seems to be stepping out of the shadow of Paid Search. In a recent Ad-tech survey, 57% of respondants reported prioritising SEO as a fundamental part of their marketing activity, up from 45% in 2006. With many verticals particularly finance reporting high CPC, SEO particularly through effective long-tail mining can provide a cost effective alternative.

Suprisingly however Behavioural (or perhaps not suprisingly), Behavioural is making a comeback. It is often said it is the channels that improvise that flourish, and I would suggest this is possibly true both here and within the Affilaite community. Whilst SEO and Paid Search (PPC) have remained relatively (dare I say) stagnant over the last few years, both the Affiliate and Behavioural roots are flourishing.

Perhaps this is a heads up to us UK SEO specialists (well all SEO’s in fact), Its time to improvise…

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