The Future of Marketing

For over a year now, HitTail has been talking to its audience about one aspect of the future of marketing--the long tail, where smaller more agile companies can live in "niches" left behind by larger competitors. It works perfectly online, because inexpensive "word of mouth" marketing is intensified through the ability to forward links in email and the use of social networks. But marketing hasn't completely changed. There still are plenty of companies with large budgets, able to shape popular perceptions through saturation TV, print and radio campaigns. These days, those companies are simply adding online banner ads and keyword campaigns to the mix. But it's all still basically just advertising.

Now, the practice of taking advantage of how Google arbitrates traffic to use it to your natural advantage has evolved into the field of search engine optimization. But it's a field that continually shifts, just as the search results do. It only comprises a fraction of what we call marketing. Pay-per-click (a.k.a. Google AdWords) makes this process a bit clearer and more accessible to the mainstream, but even with that added in, it only accounts for maybe $10 billion of what is maybe a $500 billion industry. To really divine the future of marketing, you have to look at how a "long-tail" or niche advertising campaign picks up momentum, and how the company intelligently leverages its revenue to go back into more creative marketing, and how the snowball effect can kick in.

HitTail prescribes a particular formula that helps small to medium sized companies master that process of generating consistent, reliable small successes. When enough of these small successes compound on each other, they fund more aggressive and expensive campaigns. It's very possible, for example, to have completely free natural search produce your first dozen customers, who can fund you to start your first pay-per-click campaign.

Now, if this all sounds very entrepreneurial to you, well then, you got the point. The future of marketing is not about the large, established and complacent organizations. It's about the little guy with enough creativity, determination and patience to get that snowball rolling... rolling... rolling... straight at that stationary competitor.

Blogging with real-time data

We recently came across a great example of 1) how quickly a new blog post can appear in search results and 2) the value of HitTail's real-time reporting.

Kenton Newby describes his experience with amazing indexing results after publishing a blog post and finding it in search results within 2 hours of posting it and at the top of the 2nd page of results for the query "define Google Analytics bounce rate"

We've discussed these types of cases in the past here. One of the big advantages of PPC is that you see results immediately after you activate an ad campaign. With SEO, it usually takes longer to see the results of your work. However, blogging has shown that this gap is narrowing and that it's possible to see the results of your SEO efforts in natural search results within hours or days of publishing.

Note that HitTail's real-time report alerted Kenton to the fact that his blog post was getting traffic as it occurred. This realization would not have been possible using other analytics tools where there is a delay in viewing referrer data.

How do you take action on this data?

The real-time data is especially useful for bloggers who pay attention to social media and get a lot of their traffic from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. For example, if you are logged in to your HitTail account and you notice a bunch of new referrers on the Search Hits tab from StumbleUpon or Digg, you can take action immediately by bookmarking the site yourself or notifying your network to increase visibility for that blog post. This practice has the potential to create a quick short-term boost in traffic.