Online marketing has changed a lot over the past 10 years. It just makes me wonder…ten years from now, what’s going to be obsolete and what will still be working? Will there even be such thing as SEO? What about email marketing…or social media marketing? How can you make sure that you’re investing your time, money and energy into marketing strategies that will still be working in 10 years?
After giving this careful thought, I’ve come up with five things which I believe will always be relevant and effective in online marketing. You can invest your time, money and energy into these strategies with confidence.
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List Building & Lead Generation
List building and lead generation is how a lot of the top online marketers are creating long term success and sustainable growth. However, this practice has been around a lot longer than the internet and for a very good reason. It works. People buy things, so if you build relationships with a lot of people and do a good job at maintaining those relationships, you can keep selling products and services to those people.
This is probably the biggest secret in business, and as long as business is dependent on people purchasing products and services, it will always be an essential part of effective marketing.
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Reputation Building
Online reviews have become more and more important over the past few years, especially for small, local businesses. If you have a lot of positive online reviews, you’re going to do well with online marketing. You’re going to be more visible in the search engines and you’re going to get more conversions. Even if search engines are replaced by another type of technology (SIRI, for instance), reviews will still be important because consumers trust peer reviews more than they trust straight marketing messages. MSI is now offering reputation management and alerts.
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Ad Placement
As long as people are using the internet to read, watch and listen to content, or to connect with each other via email or Facebook, ad placement will be a solid method for promoting products and services. The only thing which could possibly change this is if services like Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, You Tube and other popular websites were to go from being funded by advertising dollars to being funded by monthly membership fees.
I think it’s safe to say that this will never happen. People have become accustomed to getting these services for free, which means that the media companies that provide them will need to sell ad space to companies.
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Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another method which has been around for longer than the internet. The internet has simply made it much more popular. While I believe that affiliate marketing will be weighed down by government regulations, perhaps pretty heavily, over the next ten years, I think it’s safe to say that affiliate marketing will always work. Paying a commission to have other people promote your products is a fabulous arrangement for companies and for affiliates alike.
In some rare cases, it can be frustrating for the consumer, as in the case where affiliates write bogus or bias product reviews in order to earn affiliate commissions. But I believe this is where regulation is inevitable. As long as there’s money to be earned through affiliate commissions, it will always be used in one form or another.
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Visitor Behavior Monitoring
Perhaps the most valuable advantage online marketing has brought us is the ability to see our visitor’s actions when they visit one of our web properties. Not only do I believe that visitor behavior monitoring will be a trump card for online marketers, I think it will become even more important as online technology advances. While I do think we’ll see some heavy regulation on visitor monitoring over the next ten years, I expect visitor behavior monitoring to become even more efficient and therefore more important to online marketing success.
We can already see screenshots of exactly what our visitors are doing when they’re on our websites. We can see what links they click, the pages they view and the time they spend on those pages. We can see what type of browser they use. Some programs can even track people’s behaviors as they move from one site to another. It will be interesting to see how online technology will continue to give us insights into our prospect’s behaviors in the future, but you can bet it’s only going to become more important.
Those are the five things which I believe will always work for online marketing.
What do you think? What else will still be working in ten years? What will be dead and what will still be alive and well? I’d love to hear your responses, so post them below this blog.
