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Published Article
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Marketing
Trends from the Digital Frontlines
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The web and ways to market
on the web continue to evolve at warp speed - we see some positive
and negative changes occurring - our observations du jour:
| 1. |
Publishers
are finally starting to charge for branded content. It's
still difficult to do, but we are seeing many newsletter
publishers charging from $30-100 per subscriber per annum.
And, most importantly, many people are finally starting
to accept the need to pay for quality content.
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| 2. |
Contrary
to popular opinion, the web's epicenter is not San Francisco,
Tokyo, Washington D.C./northern VA, Seattle, London or
Austin. There is no epicenter ... it's everywhere. We
now have over 427M (Dataquest & Nua) people using
the web and its truly become a global medium/marketing
venue/information highway.
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| 3. |
More good
news for e-commerce enabled business models. Recent published
reports (Boston Consulting Group & eShop) indicate
customer acquisition costs have dropped from $45 per individual
customer in Q-4 of 2000 to $18 in Q-1 in 2001.
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| 4. |
Adobe continues
to push PDF format as a web standard. Over 32% of corporate
web sites today have Acrobat PDF-enabling their web sites.
Why we will never know (?), as it isn't an HTML standard
but was originally developed to facilitate printing of
documents. And, it doesn't work well on many web sites,
especially for those coming in with slow connections or
when you are trying to view more than a couple of pages.
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| 5. |
Surprise,
surprise! Splash pages are still increasing in popularity,
with an estimated 18% of web sites today incorporating
them. Let's be clear: we think they are really lame (to
use a technical marketing term). They slow down the user
experience and cause many people to click away from a
web site in annoyance with no bookmark and no return visit.
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| 6. |
Opt-in e-mail
continues to grow in popularity and to reflect the web's
ability to handle rich media content. The HTML format
is rapidly becoming standard in many e-mail campaigns
and we are starting to see streaming audio and video plug
in components (running in the background) and even integrated
voice mail, as just announced last month by YesMail. But,
watch those conversion rates fall; opt-in e-mail is in
danger of becoming this year's banner advertising.
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| 7. |
Newsletters
have become mainstream ways to communicate with customers,
generate revenue via ad inserts and drive a brand into
the marketplace. Now there are ASP (application service
provider) solutions being brought to market by Microsoft
and many others than enable a small or large company to
manage all aspects of newsletter marketing via a browser.
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| 8. |
No secret
the web is maturing. There's been a media firestorm the
last few weeks about how only four companies (AOL, Microsoft,
Yahoo and Napster) commanded approximately 50% of the
overall traffic on the web. Most disturbing to those of
us not with the aforementioned companies (Sidebar: am
sure Steve Case and Bob Pittman are very happy), eleven
companies commanded this percentage about a year ago.
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| 9. |
Traditional
media is experiencing the same market downturn that interactive
ad agencies have been getting. Look at your recent Newsweek,
Der Stern, Time, Business 2.0, Upside, Fast Company, or
Wired and you'll see they would do Jenny Craig proud -
they've lost a lot of ad weight.
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| 10. |
Popups, popovers,
popunders - whatever the term you want to use for those
annoying interstitial types of ads are still continuing
to be deployed on more and more web sites. We think they
are just bad marketing and are being used by sites or
companies that can't figure out how to generate revenue
with content (see #1) or, dare we say, real services!
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Lee Traupel has
20 plus years of marketing experience. He is the co-founder
of a Northern California and Brussels, Belgium based,
privately held, Marketing Services and Software Company,
Intelective
Communications, Inc. Intelective focuses exclusively
on providing services to small-to-medium-sized companies
that need strategic and tactical marketing services. He
can be reached at Lee@intelective.com.
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