Why marketers should pay attention to Google+

While it may be a little early to speculate, let’s go ahead and look at some of the potential draw cards.

According to Quirk social media manager, Catherine Scott, social media promises integration of internet technology and your social world. It is about merging online and real life experiences. In today’s world we tend to spend a lot of time online and it’s important that we feel like that time is used effectively.

Facebook achieved this to a degree but it has fallen a little short in some areas. While Facebook offers users the ability to link up with friends, chat with them, share interesting information, organise events, collate a phone book, create an online photo gallery and much more, there is a draw-back. You need to log in to Facebook in order to do these things. This means that users are drawn away from their other online activities and platforms. Integration should be seamless and unfortunately this is not entirely the case with Facebook, with an increasing number of users experiencing a sense of ‘Facebook fatigue’.

Now with Google+ everything you do online (if you use Google as a search engine – and according to Karma Snack 85.72% of internet users do) is connected to your digital social world. So for instance, if you have a Google+ account, and you search for hotels in Cape Town, you are more likely to get results that other contacts connected to your Google+ account have already +1′d. A +1 (plus one) is Google’s version of a Facebook Like.

So what does this mean for organisations?

Consider that social media platforms are spaces that large groups of people already interact in. Many brands have turned to platforms like Facebook and Twitter and the like to market and engage with online communities. Google+ offers yet another avenue for them to follow, and a potentially attractive one at that.

Later this year, Google will launch a full Google+ business platform. And as with the existing Google+ platform, there are some major potential benefits of using the Google+ business offering.

For one, many businesses already use Google AdWords or Google display advertising. Consider how integration might improve a brand’s ability to target these adverts. If your fans are all on Google+, it could mean great things in terms of delivering content that speaks to their needs.

Google+ also uses ‘circles’ to add contacts. This tool offers ease of use and easy segmentation of different groups of contacts. For personal pages these could be friends, family, co-workers etc, and the actual group segments are only known to the page owner. If this is carried through to the Google+ business option, it would present a great opportunity for targeting and community database segmentation.

The integration of Google+ with other Google services such as analytics, search, YouTube, Blogger etc, also means that the platform could offer the means to build more holistic views of users. User privacy is a huge issue here, as this was another area in which Facebook consistently failed to answer to users’ concerns.

After the launch of Google+ and in the absence of a bespoke business platform, many brands created personal pages in order to explore the site and look at marketing and community engagement options. But Google already had plans of its own and suspended these rogue profiles. (On a side note, they’ve also suspended or deleted profiles of users who create accounts in pseudonyms – a potential problem for anonymous writers and bloggers!)

Without a full understanding of what Google+ for business will ultimately offer, speculation is rife. But the possibilities are certainly intriguing. In the mean time, consider starting up a private Google+ account of your own and exploring the platform. Also remember that social media should always be integrated into your entire digital marketing strategy and should make sense from a business perspective.

Keryn Brews is a research writer for Quirk Education. Interested in learning more about social media and how it can benefit your digital marketing efforts?  Visit http://www.quirk.biz/courses/socialmedia for more information.

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Digital Advertising, Performance and Retention Solutions Will Be 70% of SMB …

CHANTILLY, Va., Aug. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ –
Small and medium-sized businesses will continue the recent trend of shifting their marketing budgets to digital advertising, performance-based platforms and customer retention business solutions over the next five years, according to a new U.S. SMB Spending Forecast by BIA/Kelsey. This trend creates an increasingly large market opportunity for businesses serving SMBs and developing SMB tools.

By 2015 SMBs will allocate 30 percent of their marketing budgets to traditional advertising (down from 52 percent in 2010), with the remaining 70 percent going to digital/online media (mobile, social, online directories, online display, digital outdoor), performance-based commerce (pay-per-click, deals, couponing) and customer retention business solutions (email, reputation and presence management, websites, social marketing, calendaring/appointment-setting).

“With the advent of daily deals to drive customer acquisition, SMBs are now increasingly focused on leveraging technological solutions to engage, grow and retain a higher percentage of their customers,” said Neal Polachek, president, BIA/Kelsey. “As this trend accelerates, these SMBs will turn to outside providers — media companies as well as pure-play technology providers — to harness simple tools, which will enable them to maximize the long-term value of each new customer they acquire.”

BIA/Kelsey’s U.S. SMB Spending Forecast is derived from the firm’s U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast and its proprietary Local Commerce Monitor study, which tracks the advertising and marketing spending habits of SMBs. The forecast’s key findings include:

Overall, U.S. SMB spending on media, marketing and business solutions will grow from $22.4 billion in 2010 to $40.2 billion in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12 percent.

SMB spending on traditional advertising will be essentially flat during the forecast period, experiencing a 0.6 percent CAGR, from $11.8 billion in 2010 to $12.1 billion in 2015.

SMB spending on digital/online media will grow from $5.4 billion in 2010 to $16.6 billion in 2015 (24.9 percent CAGR).

SMBs will also increase spending on performance-based commerce and transaction platforms, from $1.7 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion in 2015 (21.5 percent CAGR).

Spending by SMBs on customer retention business solutions will grow from $3.5 billion in 2010 to $6.9 billion in 2015 (14.6 percent CAGR).

“Our forecast clearly indicates that the allocation of SMB advertising and marketing dollars for acquiring and retaining customers will both shift and grow over the next five years,” said Mark Fratrik, vice president, BIA/Kelsey. “Traditional media companies and new upstarts that are actively building products and solutions in the areas of digital display, SEM/SEO, email marketing, calendaring, and other acquisition and retention tools will be in a good position to take full advantage of this substantive change in the overall SMB landscape.”

BIA/Kelsey will present its new U.S. SMB Spending Forecast to attendees of its upcoming conference, DMS ’11: The Summit for Small-Business Advertising Solutions, which takes place Sept. 20-22 in Denver. DMS ’11 is focused on how marketing services and solution providers can increase their penetration and profitability with SMBs.

The DMS ’11 program features more than 50 senior executives from across the small-business marketing solutions marketplace, including headliners Rita Fabi, head of market solutions, global customer marketing and communications, Facebook; Joe Walsh, president and CEO, Yellowbook; Clare Hart, CEO, Infogroup; Pat Hays, vice president of global search and display services, Microsoft; and Ben Smith, founder, MerchantCircle.

Conference sponsors include 3L System Group, Acxiom, Amdocs, Hostopia, Infycosm, Kenshoo Local, Local Matters, Localeze, Location3 Media, Marchex, Moon Valley, Telmetrics, TrafficMedia and vSplash. Association partners include the Association of Directory Publishers and the Local Search Association. Media partners include BIG Marketing for Small Business, ConferenceGuru.com, Search Marketing Standard Magazine, Street Fight, Topseos and Visibility Magazine. For more information about DMS ’11, including the complete agenda, list of speakers and companies attending, visit
www.biakelsey.com/DMS2011 .

About BIA/Kelsey

BIA/Kelsey advises companies in the local media space through consulting and valuation services, research, Continuous Advisory Services and conferences. Since 1983 BIA/Kelsey has been a resource to the media, mobile advertising, telecommunications, Yellow Pages and electronic directory markets, as well as to government agencies, law firms and investment companies looking to understand trends and revenue drivers. BIA/Kelsey’s annual conferences draw executives from across industries seeking expert guidance on how companies are finding innovative ways to grow. Additional information is available at
http://www.biakelsey.com , on the company’s Local Media Watch blog, Twitter (
http://twitter.com/BIAKelsey ) and Facebook (
http://www.facebook.com/biakelsey ).

SOURCE BIA/Kelsey

Copyright (C) 2011 PR Newswire. All rights reserved

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