Trends: Pay for Call Ads Gaining

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 17-May-2005 02:55 PM
Is pay-per-call advertising in your future? A marketing leader thinks so. That pay-per-call advertising will be more effective at closing deals than the web tops Larry Chase's list of marketing trends.

Commemorating his 10th anniversary of publishing Web Digest For Marketers email newsletter, Chase has published his top 10 trends in marketing. Among them are these six:

* Pay-Per-Call Advertising: Why? Because the chances of closing a lead or prospect on the phone are many times higher than someone who simply clicks through to your web site.

* Pod Casting: Why? Because people like time-shifting. They do it now with TiVos, DVDs and for the past 20+ years, with VCRs. They're downloading MP3 audio segments into their MP3 players and iPods. People even download MP4 videos into their PlayStation Portables. This trend is not limited to music and the consumer space. Look for B2B content downloads to pick up momentum.

* Reverb Marketing: Why? Consumers are experiencing media saturation. So they're now consuming multiple channels simultaneously. Research already shows a large percentage of Internet users have TV playing in the background while on the Internet. They're using TV like radio now. Tip: People are apt to miss the 800 number shown onscreen at the end of a TV spot because they're only listening and not watching the tube. The media planners' term, "road blocking," will be redefined to mean hitting the target audience with two messages simultaneously using two different media channels.

* Multimedia Blogs: Blogs are not only here to stay, they're going multimedia. Audio and video blogs will be commonplace shortly.

* Email Marketing Remains Essential: The spam problem will get solved. Why? Because it has to. Business and consumers alike now rely heavily on the email platform. Even if email postage is the solution, email marketing will still be faster and more cost-effective than most other competing channels.

* Vertical Search Engines: No one wants to deal with "4 million relevant search results." Focused search tools will help users find what they're looking for faster and command higher ad rates due to their specificity.

You can view the rest of the trends at Chase's Web Digest For Marketers home page: http://wdfm.com