The Pontiflex Blog

Forrester predicts growth in social marketing

April 28, 2009 at 12:56 pm Arun Krishnan Leave a comment

An interesting article in Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim blog today.

Forrester has just released its outlook for the next three years.  In these turbulent times, when the market oscillates like the weather which in turn moves with the waywardness of a particularly enthusiastic yoyo, making predictions nowadays takes wisdom, as it does courage. Here’s the graphic, along with some relevant points and analysis.

1. Even in tough economic times, online advertising will continue to grow at the expense of offline advertising. As mentioned by so many of our customers, this is because online advertising enables advertisers to get higher returns on their marketing dollars as well as generate higher returns.

2. Social networking will drive growth in online advertising. This is not surprising. After all social networking enables brands to engage consumers in highly relevant ways. A caveat here. For this growth to take place, social networks will have to innovate to make the advertising more meaningful for advertisers as well as consumers.  As outlined in the J.P. Morgan 2009 Nothing  but Net report, social networks will have to offer among other things performance advertising (CPL), or the sale of virtual good to deepen the user experience – in short advertising that leverages their unique ability to enable advertisers and consumers to have meaningful conversations with each other.

3. The growth in email will also continue. It is to be noted that the graph above calls out the growth in third party email advertising. As evidenced in a variety of recent industry studies marketing to in-house lists through ESPs and CRM solutions deliver the highest ROI and represent an area of explosive growth.

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