Interactive Marketing Review (2009)

Despite the recession, the interactive marketing environment is still growing and diversifying. This development creates many opportunities for actors of the interactive marketing market. The recession forces people to be more creative and more competent with their marketing campaigns.

The forecast for 2010 and beyond in interactive marketing is promising. The spending in interactive marketing (mobile marketing, social media, email marketing, display advertising, search marketing) will be significantly increasing for the next 5 years.

At the end of 2009 Google added some new ad formats. Site links, with more links appearing for the ranking results. Every result on the top page will have more clickable links, which can be seen as an opportunity for interactive marketers. Google’s product search is also another update. Product extensions and listings are getting more developed on the ranking results. When doing a general research like laptop, in addition to websites, you have a product view with a link and the price of the product. Make sure to have your images optimized if you want to benefit from this feature.

Google Caffeine will be released “sometime after the holidays”; it will bring some significant changes in interactive marketing. It will have direct effects on crawling, ranking and indexing. Google Caffeine will focus on real-time results by creating frequent content updates and participating in social media communities. Under websites links will scroll some recent social media activity as tweets for instance. This is another chance to maximize your ranking. It will also provide faster results. Page load time will be an algorithmic ranking factor. With webmaster central, Google gives you the time your page takes to load compared to the majority of websites. Page loading time will have an effect on quality score for PPC and SEO. The last point is that Google Caffeine will provide more blended search results as images, videos, blogs, social search, maps, etc.

In order to benefit from Google Caffeine you have to drive more traffic to your website through increased channel as social media and real-time. Use Twitter and other social media to increase inbound links to your site. Increase your brand visibility on the internet. Be careful when having a social media policy; be sure to develop a content strategy with frequent and consistent updates.

Don’t forget Bing and Yahoo! The factors when optimizing for Bing are almost the same as when optimizing for Google. If you follow the same strategy you should succeed. Be aware that your ranking results won’t be the same for Yahoo and Bing even if they have a partnership.

As a conclusion, in the future be sure to have SEO and content strategies for web, images, videos, social media, news and real-time.

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