As well as analysing data and crunching all the numbers to show you how the land currently lies, it also looks at movements and trends to give you an idea of where things might be heading. One of the themes that’s comes out of recent IPA Bellwether Reports is that online marketing is growing. Whilst there may be fluctuations in other sectors, this is one area that is enjoying consistent expansion. And it looks set to continue. As businesses become more and more aware of the potential of internet marketing, they’re setting aside more and more of their budgets for online campaigns.
Targeted and effective
Internet marketing is gaining the edge over other, more traditional forms of marketing for a number of reasons. One of these is that it can be targeted to the interests of the customer. Whether this is video ads in streamed content or bespoke ads tailored to recent searches, online marketing has the ability to be finely calibrated. It allows businesses to communicate with potential customers that are hard to reach via the usual channels. It’s well-suited to a culture where people are increasingly ‘always on’, whether that’s on their laptop, notebook, tablet or smartphone.
Measurable and analysable
Online marketing is a growth area generally. Within that, what’s expanding in particular is performance marketing. In addition to its targetability, one of the further big pluses of online marketing is its trackability. If you set things up right, you get a whole raft of data with an online campaign that can show you what’s picking up clicks, which content works best in which context and which content isn’t perhaps performing as well. Getting to grips with this data and analysing it to tease out the themes and trends is useful looking forward as well as looking back. It allows businesses to tweak and hone their future campaigns to better reach the customers they’re after. This is why we’re seeing more and more businesses investing in Ecommerce performance marketing.
The IPA Bellwether Report shows that online marketing is on the up. It’s growing because it fits with the increasingly digital world in which we’re living. As customers, we’re spending less and less time consuming traditional media and more and more time online on a range of devices. As online marketing spends steadily expand, businesses increasingly want to know exactly what they’re getting for their money. So along with bigger online marketing spends, we’re also seeing more interest in Ecommerce performance marketing. By improving their advertising inventories and focussing on trackability and measurability, businesses are able to craft targeted and effective online campaigns that reach the parts of the market that other forms can’t.
Tim Aldiss writes for Cloud-iQ the conversion optimisation experts.
