eROI Days Email Agency

4. Democrat majority in Congress swings the tide of online marketing. Marketers will push the envelope far more aggressively in 2007 now that the fear of death by Republican firing squad has been reduced. Moral depravity will run rampant in advertising and the largely Democratic online marketers will revel in the end-result of their twisted creative brains.

5. Most successful companies will become media companies. Microsoft became a media company when it began its blogging program a couple years ago. The lawyers lost and marketers won – revealing the inside scoop at Microsoft was virtually the only thing that has healed the company’s battered reputation. More and more companies are starting their own blogs, helping them to become more relevant and newsworthy to a greater audience within their niche. Blogging has essentially forced companies to step into their customers’ shoes and provide them with more industry knowledge and news, rather than simply ramming products down their throats.

6. Great Content is King. Quality content is more important now than ever before. Each of us receives dozens of email newsletters on a daily basis. There are over 100 million viewings DAILY on YouTube. One in twenty visits on the web is to a social networking site where new content is generated every second. There is a glut of content and it’s only going to get more crowded. The key point worth noting is that the few companies providing great content are HUGE winners because of all of the online and offline marketing channels that work together in a sort of crescendo effect, amplifying the messaging of well positioned brands. Word of mouth spreads so much faster than it used to through blogs, iTunes, YouTube, MySpace, websites, and online press. Fans of the TV program “Grey’s Anatomy” can convert non-believers because the content of the show is good enough to keep them once they’ve heard about it. The opposite holds true of “Snakes on a Plane” which had a huge online following, but bombed at the box office because the content sucked. Keep this in mind when strategizing and implementing your next viral marketing site or email campaign.

7. Email marketers will demand more strategy from their marketing agencies. From the client-side email marketer’s perspective, there are only minor differences between the top email marketing software platforms. Email marketers will demand to know more advanced strategies for their email programs by asking questions like: how does this email render in the default settings of the different email environments (AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.)? What content shows up above and below the fold on the email preview? What content and call-to-action will really resonate with my target audience? How can I be a resource and still convert click throughs into qualified leads?

8. User-generated content will be a component on most new websites. Many companies are just starting to realize the great potential of websites with user-generated content that enable customers co-create with their brands. Ultimately, allowing users to post their stories through text, images, and video, helps to build community and long-term brand loyalty. In short, it works, and companies large (Diesel-U-Music) and small (Dunderdon Workspace) will employ this strategy much more frequently next year.

9. Viral campaign websites will have a purpose. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been forwarded hundreds of quirky sites that are experimenting with the whole viral marketing thing and that have no further purpose whatsoever. There are no calls-to-action or indications as to why these sites exist. A few examples of pointless viral sites include: Patron’s SimplyPerfect, eROI’s WearShortShorts, and the pointless but popular CareerBuilder Monk-e-Mail/. Next year will feature more substantial viral campaign sites like Philips’ ShaveEverywhere, Kettle Foods’ PassportToFlavor, and Snakes on a Plane.

It’s Thanksgiving Day and it’s that time of year again when eROI makes its outlandish predictions for the year to come. In prior years we have given you a mix of business and personal lifestyle predictions, but this year we’re sticking to just the online marketing world. We busted out our omniscient crystal ball and this is what it told us:

Top 10 Online Marketing Predictions for 2007
10. Social networking will get more and more niche. Social Networking has blanketed the news for the past 18 months because it works. YouTube and MySpace have built loyal communities through entertaining user-generated content and great tools for communicating with other like-minded people. However, Social Networking is going NICHE. People use specific tools to connect, recommend, rate, and communicate within their niche groups. For this reason, there are many types of Social Media now and there will be five times this many by the end of next year:

B2C: MySpace, Facebook, Gaia, Friendster, Second Life
B2B: LinkedIn, Jigsaw
Search: Digg, Delicious, Wink, Technorati
Shopping: Wists, ThisNext, Woot
Expert Communities: Blogs, Wikis
Mapping: Geosearch
Video: YouTube, TurnHere, Splashcast
Images: flickr