Today’s Marketing

I could not find the time to update my blog for the past one month.   Yesterday when I was going through articles and research findings I came across some important facts which I thought of sharing with you.

It looks like that  in the  year 2010 search engines are going to play a major role than  before.  Influence of search results is the major part of the purchase decision cycle. Based on research it was found that 68.3% of search was related to the consideration stage and almost  42.6% search came for decision stage.



When looking at the above graph it is also clear in the  recent past the money spent on online had taken high and had exceeded the other mediums. Also in the travel industry search engines are the game deciders. In year 2009 so far it has been noted that 66% of the travelers use internet to plan their travel arrangements, 56% made online reservation and 34% of the travelers visit search engines first when considering destinations. The trend looks amazing and it shows search engine marketing is going to be the high prominent marketing strategy for travel firms. (This is not only for tranvel but for other industries as well)

In the search engine market still Google remains as the market leader. Please see below the graph

But there are threats for Google as well because of the rise of Bing. Google has already lost its 1% market share and Bing starting to grow . Within just a 3 months it has gained the 0.4% market share which has high  travel technology as well. So in future it can be turned out as a major travel search engine. Let’s see what happens.

Now its time for e-marketers to look at the new search display trends. You need not consider just building web links. Now its time to think of videos, news articles, blog posts, images etc. Google algorithm also has changed accordingly. In simple it means SEO is not going to be the just tweaking the site. It is all about creating and optimizing whatever forms of content make sense for the business  industry. Now Google has changed the algorithm, which values the video content much as well. Also according to research, video marketing is the number one tactics that US marketers are focusing in 2009. Please see below the e-market source

So what are the recent changes in Google? It has recently announced (Oct 7, 2009) the search results now feature an option allowing users to view formatted PDFs from within the browser. Also Google introduced the new feature on Sep 23, 2009, to the Gooel toolbar that  allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web site. The more comments you have for your site the more value is  increased.

Google’s searchwiki, a major addition to its user interface that allows users to edit search results. When using searchwiki you can re-order, remove or add web pages to search results for any query. You can add any number of comments you want, but there are few criteria Google consider. The quality of the entry, the author and user contributed signals such as voting and flagging. But one thing I have noticed the old SEO mantra remains the same. Meta tags, title header, alt tags and content are the kings anyway.

Few travel insights

Social media integration like videos , photos , blogging and tweets are going to play a major part. In simple I can see that the role of Social media effort is to directly influence social communities  so that the social media pages show up in the search results.

Using the social media effectively is going to be the major factor in future. Measuring the ROI and taking proper actions are going to be critical. Based on e-marketer research 84% of Social Media Programs don’t measure ROI. They just do everything without having proper mechanism,

Please find below some measuirememnt of ROI you can use.

ROI is a function of the goals may not always be monetary, but people have to consider ROO(return on objectives) such as branding, awareness relationship and engagement.

Here are some cool tools I found when getting contents for my post.

Post Rank – Allows to enter a feed URL and returns statistics about its posts, including which are the most popular based on how many times they are shared on variety of social networking sites.

Xinu – Is a handy website where you can type in a URL and receive a load of useful statistics ranging from SEO to social bookmarking and more.

Google Trends – People can compare the world largest interest in favorite topics.

Also use Google analytics and feedburner, quancast and copmeptecom If you are running a small site you can use Clicky instead of analytics.

Although off line marketing trend is stronger now,   but it is time for every business circle to think of online marketing much stronger than before.