We’ve got about two weeks here at the One Degree offices (virtual as they may be) before we break for the holidays. To wrap up the year in fine style I’ve asked some of the One Degree Contributors to provide us with a rewind of 2006 and a fast forward to 2007 to give you something substantial to chew on as the days get shorter. Keith Holloway shares his thoughts on the highs and lows of this year and what we can expect next year…
1. Rewind – What trends in Internet marketing surprised you in 2006?
- Search Engine Optimization is on almost everyone’s radar screen. I’ve been in the field for about 8 years and it has always been an uphill battle convincing people that it has any value. Now people are calling me asking for it regularly. Web Analytics has also become something clients are far more interested in than ever before.
- The explosion of online video. The rise of YouTube and the subsequent acquisition by Google. We’ve expected video to become more and more important on the Internet as broadband access becomes ubiquitous, but the speed of adoption is phenomenal.
- The rise of Podcasting.
2. Rewind – Did you add any new tools to your online marketing toolkit in 2006?
- Trellian keyworddiscovery tool breaks out as the best keyword research tool on the market. It beats out the other tools we’ve been using including Wordtracker by a long shot.
- Our own: we’ve built a search marketing dashboard in response to the renewed interest in SEO.
3. Fast Forward – What do you see as the biggest trends in Internet Marketing in 2007?
- An increase in the use of video on web sites as a marketing and sales tool to increase conversion and assist in the sales process.We also expect to see an increased use of video and image ads in Google.
- The use of personas in developing more effective web site content.
- Total spend on Pay Per Click advertising increases. Ads and landing pages will get more relevant as achieving and maintaining high conversion rates become essential to compete because of price increases. Medium and large businesses get more interested in SEO due to skyrocketing PPC advertising costs.
4. Fast Forward – At the end of 2007, what do you expect we’ll be looking back at as overhyped? Video ads. It takes too long to watch them and it is too difficult to test multiple variations to optimize your campaigns. Text ads, on the other hand, are quick and easy to read and click through. People already fast forward through ads with their PVR’s so why would they specifically watch them on web sites?
5. Fast Forward – Any SPECIFIC predictions for 2007? Buy-outs, bubbles bursting, records broken, reputations toppled, break-out companies?
- Microsoft’s Live search bombs so bad it gets canned.
- The new HotMail beta gets reworked because thousands of people complain and ask to get rolled back to the previous version.
- Major consolidation of some social networking sites and the death of others. The problem of fake profiles for advertising and spam cause huge difficulties in management of the sites and keeping audiences interested.
- The rise of Democracy player and on demand Internet TV.