Keeping Up-to-Date with Internet Marketing Trends

Marketing in many ways has been a pretty traditional subject for a long time. You learn about flyers, brochures, direct mail and PR quite early on in business and for a long time this type of activity was the mainstay of our marketing toolbox. Then "the web" arrived... and for a while websites were ok too as they were included in our list of marketing options - we just had to grapple with remembering to add our website address onto brochures, flyers, mail-shots and into our PR.

When it became clear that the Internet wasn't just about websites but using the technology to get traffic to them, we began a steep learning curve that has probably changed the way we think about marketing permanently.

Enter SEO (search engine optimisation), email marketing, social media and online advertising. There are days when I wonder if it can possibly change any more, as a seemingly unstoppable number of changes occur by the hour never mind the month or year as they used to. I'm not as old as I probably sound at this point (really) but it certainly keeps you on your toes. Thankfully I find Internet marketing absolutely fascinating, and along with others, get ridiculously excited about what the technology enables us to achieve as marketers. Just the ability to measure everything so accurately alone reinforces my belief that marketing works - the difference being now that I can prove it beyond doubt. Brilliant.

But - beware the perils of thinking you know it all. I attended the Internet Conference in Nottingham on Friday (#TIC10) to make sure I was up-to-date with Internet marketing developments. Of course I wasn't! I listened to Charles Arthur, Technology Editor at The Guardian, reminding us that the stats aren't all they're cracked up to be. He's right of course, the huge rise in smartphone traffic to access social networks like Twitter and Facebook has a big impact on the figures we think we're seeing. Susan Hallam continued with some really useful insights into the recent changes to Google Search, more than you think.... And then it was a good job I then went into a session with Dr Dave Chaffey, digging deep into Google Analytics and how to track traffic sources with much better segmentation than I had been.

It was a really useful day and although it was time out of my business, it will pay back by keeping me ahead of the latest marketing trends for my clients and our own websites at MarketingPlanWiz and soon BusinessPlanWiz.

It's worth taking a look at the presentation slides from the Internet Marketing Conference as they're full of useful points. I'm off next to the online marketing show in London in June where I'd quite like to discover that the Internet will soon be able to make dinner for me when I get home.

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk