A turn of a new decade invokes a reflection of trends from the past ten years, while stirring up curiosity as to what’s in store for the next ten. We couldn’t agree more with these 5 recommendations for online marketing in the new decade from Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that tracks and analyzes advertising and marketing trends:

1. Identify and copy the fastest-growing companies. The gap is widening between the “get it” and “doesn’t get it” companies. The ones who get it are growing fast. Watch – and copy – what they’re selling and how they sell.

2. Partner with someone. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft and other tech companies are all hungry for local growth. So are local media companies that are partnering. The fastest-growing revenue streams are likely to come from partnership deals in 2010.

3. Use the Internet as a utility to tap faster-growing “non-advertising” marketing dollars. The amount spent on traditional advertising may be in perpetual decline. Monitor this trend, and start helping businesses where they’re spending more dollars – on the “non-advertising” side – including social networking, search engine optimization, promotions, rebates, contest and coupons.

4. Keep your hands on the wheel with mobile advertising. Mobile is the new disruptor, and absolutely worth experimenting with. But don’t over-commit resources. Like the Web 10 years ago, it will take several years for local advertisers to warm up to mobile en masse.

5. Capitalize on the transformation to video. Consumer comfort levels with Web-based video are high, and local advertisers are likely to follow in much larger numbers next year – not only buying up pre-roll commercials, but also buying longer “infomercial” type video embedded within online directories and inside banner ads.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 11:53 am and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.