As a wrap up on 2006 marketing, MarketingSherpa and ad:tech created a survey to ask online marketers what worked in 2006 and where they expected to spend their time, efforts and dollars in 2007:
What I find really interesting is that Email is both on the top of the list - and the bottom. House lists rank #2 in effectiveness, while rented lists are on the bottom. Our email marketing business is reflecting that trend, with more and interest being shown every day - in an industry that I was thinking was starting to mature.
Another business I thought was starting to mature was search engine optimization - yet SEO showed the biggest jump this year.
SEM (PPC) slipped slightly, surely due to increased click costs and the increasing fear of click-fraud. I believe staying away from the content network in Google is your biggest hedge against this. All of the recent interest in PPC is most likely what's driving the growing interest in SEO. Now that marketers see that search marketing really works, they want to find new ways of getting that golden targeted traffic from search engines without paying the crazy costs per click.
Overall, It's nice to be validated in that the three main focuses of our company line up perfectly with what works in online marketing. And, yes, that's by design.
