Cameron Olthuis

Lately, we’ve seen a lot of doom & gloom reports in regards to what will happen with online advertising during the recession we’re already in. We’re even seeing some of the more popular online media companies slash their workforces in anticipation that ad spending on the Internet will drastically decline in the near future. While I certainly think companies will be forced to watch their spending, especially in regards to advertising, it’s my prediction that more money will be coming to the Internet and here is why.

1) Save gas - More and more people will be trying to save money in every way possible. This will include saving gas by making more purchases online instead of driving around town looking for the best deals.

2) Smarter purchasing - As people start to really watch their purchasing decisions they will be comparison shopping online and doing more research on the web before they make purchases. This will also lead to more online purchases as they realize these are where the best deals are.

3) More time - Again, chalk this up under the people saving more money category. As people begin to watch their spending habits, it will mean less time & money spent doing things like going out to eat, going to movies, traveling, etc etc. These will give people more free time at home, which in turn will mean more time spent online.

4) Measureable - Companies that are cutting back on ad spending will only put their money in what they absolutely know provides results. This gives online advertising a big advantage over pretty much every other form of advertising as it’s all trackable down to the click/penny.

While these are general statements, there will certainly be some sectors that spending will drastically decrease online. I think that will be luxury goods, travel, automotive, and some financial sectors.

Although I feel that advertisers will cut back on banner ads and other rich media, I think that more advertisers will be moving to affiliate type CPA stuff and CPC, as well as other Search Marketing efforts. So, that means CPM advertising may slown down but overall I still think the state of Internet Advertising is healthy.

I’m curious, what are your thoughts?

Update: I’m not the only one who thinks advertising online will remain healthy.

Shoemoney has an awesome guest post over on his blog from a 13 year-old affilite marketing whiz, David Wilkinson. It’s called “Upselling - The why, the where, the how” and it talks about how upselling is a great way to increase revenues on affiliate offers.

It’s best to push your offer to someone IMMEDIATELY after they order. Not inside the members area. Not on your blog. Not through an AdWords ad, but after they click that order button, have their credit card out and their wallet in hand. It’s simple psychology - and as a 13-year old affiliate marketer, if I can manage - you certainly can too.

While David’s article focuses specifically on affiliate offers, this strategy also works wonders for ecom. By suggesting additional products, services, and ‘exclusive’ offers - I’ve personally seen some clients realize a HUGE increase in average order size. Amounts that dwarf any ROI they were getting anywhere else.

It’s not a new strategy by any means either. As David mentions we see this everywhere. How often do you see the ‘other customers also purchased these’ or the ‘this shirt would look great with those shorts’? It works, and all the big players do it. Even things as small as ‘related links’ at the bottom of blog posts. Just don’t get to pushy like some people *cough* GoDaddy.

The point is that you should always remember your ABCs - always be upselling. It’s not always about increasing traffic. Things like improving conversion rates and upselling can go a long ways and provide far better returns.

Sidenote: Where are all these young pros coming from? Harrison, I’m looking at you to one-up this post.

There’s a lot of drama going down about some FM advertising campaign from Microsoft called ‘People Ready‘. Basically what happened is a bunch of well known bloggers talked about how their businesses became people ready and Microsoft took those quotes, put them on banner ads, and is now running those ads on those same blogs. Apparently this has upset some folks.

I don’t want to get involved in the ethics behind this as there are already plenty of valid arguments from both sides being made. But while the blogosphere bitches back and forth like a couple of newlyweds, Microsoft is laughing all the way to the bank. This campaign has already created more mindshare, discussion and buzz then they ever could of hoped for.

The only real winner here is Microsoft. This is also a huge opportunity for them to take this campaign to the next level. Are they smart enough to figure it out and take the ball and run with it?

Jeremiah Owyang has a great post this morning on the need for evolution on corporate websites.

We’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided view never ends.

Great point! You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn’t sick of that. This is precisely the reason that consumers don’t use corporate websites to research products. They’re only getting one side of the story, the marketing speak. What we really want to hear is both sides of the story. We want to hear the real story from consumers who have hands on experience with the product so we can truly find out what the product is really like. The endless amounts of user generated product review sites and blogs are testament to this.

Jeremiah goes on to make several suggestions, one of them being for corporate sites to allow customer feedback right on the site.

A savvy marketer will allow content to appear from peers, customers, and the market. These will not always be a product rave, in fact it may be downright criticism.

While I agree that it would be great to have the non-biased product reviews on the corporate site, I don’t think that quite solves the problem. That’s because we don’t and can’t trust the corporations to be truly transparent. To think that a company will allow unfiltered negative reviews along side their products is absurd. That’s why third party social review sites are here to stay.

Instead I think these corporations would be better severed to be active on the social review and other social media sites. They should be interacting with the consumers to recognize their faults, improve their products, right their wrongs, and build consumer trust in the process. As Jeremiah points out, this can also be done on community sites that are setup by these companies, like Dell’s IdeaStorm.

Do you have any other ideas how corporate websites can improve?

Update: Last.fm’s chart looks good…

Last year I wrote a couple of posts on how getting on TechCrunch isn’t a viable marketing plan. While a TechCrunch write up can certainly be a great kick-start to your marketing campaign, by no means is that traffic spike alone going to make your company a success.

A good comparison would be getting on the homepage of Digg. They will both result in a huge spike in traffic, attention from key people, a few sign ups, and a bunch of links from other bloggers but the problem is that after a few days you’re back where you started. Ok, so maybe you have a little more traction but it won’t be enough so you need to keep moving forward. Unless you have a solid PR strategy and this will be an ongoing campaign you need to have a more well rounded marketing strategy, one that results in a graph that is up and to the right, not spikes.

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Brian Provost wrote a great article outlining 8 simple steps for building traffic for your Internet startup. Here is his list…

1. Defensible traffic
2. Buy good domain names
3. Hire competent Internet people
3 a. Hold off on hiring MBA’s
4. Understand the cost of traffic
5. Build links
6. Engage your community
7. Engage social media
8. Push, pull, prod, and poke marketing

I’d like to add another one.

9. Usability - Nothing will keep a visitor from returning to your site more than poor usability. If they can’t figure out the value prop or how to use the site then you’ve just lost that person that you worked so hard to attract. And chance are they won’t ever return. It also helps if you have something of value in the first place.

I love it when big companies get called out for having a crappy online marketing strategy (Blockbuster).

I’d also like to add that their natural seo sucks; if you’re a company like Blockbuster how the hell do you let someone like DVD Avenue out-rank you? I bet I could fix that problem in about 5 minutes. Blockbuster, if you’re listening here’s a freebie: put your main “money keyword” in your title tag. Replacing parts of that image with real text wouldn’t hurt either, in fact just recode the entire HTML, it’s awful. Sometimes I wonder how some of these people still have jobs.

This would also be a good time for Blockbuster to respond if they’re monitoring their buzz. We’ll watch the original post to see if there’s a response. I’ll keep you updated.