Online Marketing Forecasts for 2010 – E-commerce to Continue to Grow

E-commerce is set to continue to grow and outperform high street retail well in to 2010 and beyond. 

A report by eMarketer shows that the online shopping trend is not likely to slow in the next few years. The ability to shop quickly, from the comfort of your own home, research products, find reviews and find the cheapest offering that competes against high street brick and mortar costs is expected to continue drawing huge interest.
 
The report predicts that e-commerce sales will hit 323 billion Euros by 2011 across Europe. The countries with the largest online spend are the UK, Germany and France who account for 72% of this total spend. More good news for UK e-commerce sites as the UK has the strongest growth rate in Europe.
 
What are the online marketing trends for 2010?
 
Sadly I do not have a magic crystal ball but we’ve already commented on what we believe to be future trends online marketing.
 
Email Marketing
 
We, along with other industry leaders, believe that email marketing spend will grow in 2010. This is something we carry out very effectively both for our own marketing and for our customers sending out tends of thousands of email each month. Key to success is making email marketing relevant so please contact read our blogs or contact your Account Manager for further details.
 
Spending Ahead of Recovery
 
Website owners, particularly e-commerce sites are buoyed by the current and predicted performance of online retail and many are spending ahead of recovery to ensure that they are well positioned to keep fighting the good marketing fight. Search engine optimisation (SEO) will remain a key to online marketing success.
 
Social Media
 
I don’t think anyone needs a crystal ball to see that social media is one of the fastest growing trends. This will continue way into 2010 and beyond. More and more brands are launching into social media an here at The WebMarketing Group we are getting increasing requests for social media optimisation (SMO).
 
Online Reputation Management
 
As more and more companies launch into social media there will be growing demand for online reputation management. Social media networks will talk more and more about brands, companies and their products and for successful e-commerce, website owners will need to engage in online reputation management. We’ve discussed that not all brand or product mentions carry sentiment and that not all sentiment is negative but for successful online marketing, companies need to engage with comments. Reward the positive, answer questions, promote the good and address the negative. Again please contact your Account Manager to discuss how we can help monitor your online reputation management.
 
Online PR
 
Online Press Releases will be another growth sector. Online PR not only work well with search engine optimisation (SEO) as they draw attention to your site driving traffic but they can be excellent marketing channels to distribute your company news to varied sources. Online PR, coupled with social media optimisation has the potential to make your news go viral and greatly increase your online marketing reach.
 
Multivariate Analysis M-VAP
 
M-VAP will grow for websites that have high traffic but poor conversion rates. Sites that are actively engaging in SEO, social media and using online PR will reach high traffic levels but may be missing a trick in that conversion rates may stay low. M-VAP is uniquely placed to make subtle design tweaks, monitor improvements an recommend changes to increase conversion rates.
 
Other online marketing trends for 2010
 
Here at The WebMarketing Group we predict that there will be growing demand for new services we will be offering very shortly. These new products are being finalised and we’ll be rolling them out soon. The new services are being thoroughly tested and once we are confident that they can deliver measurable results we’ll announce them and make them available to our existing and future customers.

 
Tagged with : Internet Marketing | SEO | Website Design | Social Media | Online PR | Online Reputation Management | M-VAP | Email Marketing