As the year end draws near, we are often given pause to reflect upon our previous goals and how our performance compared with those goals. In addition to the obvious monetary goals, I particularly enjoy trying to gain insight into market disrupters, and use these giant "what if" scenarios as possible changes that may occur in the next 1, 2, 3+ years down the line.
I believe it was about 18 months ago that I was having lunch with Morgan Moran of Tout Media and David Wachs of Cellit Mobile Marketing, talking about where marketing has been and where it might be going. Morgan and I both had more of a search background, and as such, were lamenting over the absolute gold rush the early search marketers experienced and wondered what medium could possibly experience this type of growth in the future. As a mobile marketing evangelist, David was pounding the importance of embracing mobile marketing as the next gold rush.
This begs the question for which the post is named: is mobile marketing the next search marketing?
Yes. No. Maybe.
Yes in the sense that mobile marketing will definitely be experiencing some steep growth as more and more cell phones are upgraded to using premium SMS services and as the average age of text messaging users enters the late 20s and early 30s (looking at how the average age of search engine users has changed). David could probably expound more about this, so I'll ask him to post about it, but the parallels between search users and texters is certainly there.
No in the sense that search marketing is more nebulous than organic search marketing, as it was originally viewed as; search marketing now includes more traditional advertising type services such as PPC campaign management, and in the foreseeable future will be so well integrated with online ad purchases, reputation and publicity management, and e-mail list type CRM management that I see it as becoming a conglomerative concept…digital marketing. Holding that view, I'd see mobile marketing as a piece of digital marketing, similar to how search marketing would be a piece. Thus, it wouldn't be the same gold rush type new medium, though even in this scenario, it would be a huge piece with a very bright future.
Maybe in the sense that even though we aspire to be technical and business visionaries, it can be difficult to foretell what the marketplace will accept. If the major carriers relax restrictions on acceptable programs, cell phones advance to the point where they can replace standard laptops in information management, and the ad blindness for text vs PPC/e-mail/banner occurs in an inverse relationship, then a perfect storm of the mobile marketing gold rush may surprise even those that are most expecting it.
Where will 2007 take you? Are you going get bigger in the PPC industry? Are you going to explore the deep dark waters of SEO? Are you going to develop unique and innovative mobile marketing campaigns to capture an untapped payday loan market? Regardless of what your future goals are, we hope that we can help you to get there, making 2007 your most profitable year ever.
Happy near year from Paydayloanaffiliate.com!
JoeSinkwitz