The popularity of Internet as a medium of communication and source of information has surged in the recent years and this has also affected the use of digital marketing to woo customers. Businesses today are using a variety of digital distribution channels to reach their customers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost effective manner. Direct emails, Facebook, Twitter, and the apps on smartphone and digital tablets are some of the channels in which brands are effectively connecting with customers.

Study by Yahoo! shows that digital marketing segment drew 15 billion Ducats in half of year in 2011. The global spending on digital advertising amounted to $14.9 billion in the first six months of 2011. This is 23 percent more than what was spent last the same period.

The use of social media has increased for marketing and the reasons are obvious. With more and more people joining the bandwagon on social networking sites everyday, marketers would not like to miss any opportunity to woo them before their competitors do. There were 225 million users of Twitter as per March 2011 reports and the current number of tweets per second is 1200. Facebook remains the most popular social media site with more than 750 million active users. When it comes to blogs on the Internet, 70 of the bloggers organically chirp about brands on their blogs. Naturally, the digital marketers want to advertise on these immensely popular social networking platforms. And now for the facts – the global ad revenues from social networks touched $5.54 billions and this will rise to $10 billion by the year 2013 as per a report on Tech Crunch.

Let us also check some of the digital marketing trends in the world of mobiles and smartphones. As per July 2011 data on Neilsen, more than 40 percent of the adult US mobile phone users specifically use smartphones. The figure is expected to cross the 50 percent mark by the end of year 2011. Businesses do not want to be left behind in the race to connect with their customers through these smartphones. As per a study by eMarketer, the total spending is expected to reach $1.23 billion by the end of year 2011. The year 2010 had witnessed a spending of $743 million and this year’s spending would be a 65 percent increase. The advertising amount typically includes the dollars spent on display ads, search ads and mobile video ads.

Marketing pros and advertisers have been traditionally reluctant to spend large amounts of their budgets on mobile advertising but recent trends indicate that resistance is diminishing. With the number of potential customers accessing the Internet through mobile devices steadily increasing, advertisers have started allocating more funds to mobile ads.

The reason for escalating budgets on advertising is not only due to the huge popularity of digital media. Another reason for which marketers prefer this mode is the ability to measure quick and often real time results of advertising. There are tools that let businesses know how often their ads are being clicked and what exactly attracts the attention of target audience.

Digital advertising indeed rocks – at least that’s what the stats portray!

A short introduction to the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference held in Iceland every year. This year there are speakers from Facebook, Bing, Hotels.com, Wall Street Journal, Icelandair, AOL, SAP, Boats.com YouTube and more.

For more information about the Conference go to www.rimc.is/en/

It seems that Bing favors Microsoft products, the Icelandic company DataMarket has been using that name since 2007 and has had it registered since that year. Recently Microsoft announced new services that has the same name. When you search for Datamarket on Google they came number one on both Google and Bing, now it is still number one on Google (The Microsoft DataMarket nowhere to be found) but second on Bing, with the Microsoft services number one.

Reykjavik Internet Marketing conference is just around the corner with speakers from Ericsson, Bing/Microsoft, Anomaly, CCP games and Icelandair to mention few. In its 6th year the conference is going to be bigger than ever, attracting a wider audience on an international basis. The conference is accompanied by an Expo that lasts all weekend, Netið 2010 (roughly translates Internet 2010). Some 40 – 50 companies are expected to show their Internet related products and services.

You can get more information about RIMC 2010 at www.rimc.is

As Microsoft and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the USA and the European Union they can now offer more reach to potential customers offering a search ad inventory from both the Yahoo! and Microsoft networks.

The combined audience of Yahoo and Microsoft is over 150 million searchers in the U.S and some 577 million searchers worldwide so there is much to be gained through this joined venture.

After all the rumours, Microsoft and Yahoo finally agreed to merge their search services to compete with the grand search engine, Google.

Microsoft’s new search engine – Bing will power the Yahoo search engine, while Yahoo Search Marketing will be powered by Microsoft AdCenter. Yahoo rankings are going to change once it is replaced by Bing, so if Microsoft’s search offerings have not been of any concern to you before, now is the time to become familiar with it’s rules and ways to optimize your website for Bing. Bing is an open search engine to webmaster’s optimization efforts and you can get your website, even the brand new one, to be listed at the top of Bing much faster than on Google. Once your website is well ranked on Bing’s listings you can move on to optimization for Google.

 Five simple steps to get noticed on Bing: 

 1. Choose the oldest domain – the older the domain, the more chances there are of getting your site a high ranking.

2. Pick the best keywords in the title tags of every page on your website – Bing places a lot more emphasis on title tags than Google does.

3. Come up with excellent text – for Bing the amount of text on pages holds more value than it does for Google, so aim for at least 300 words.

4. Outbound links are OK – Google is cautious of the number of outbound links you have on a page whereas Bing seems to like them.

5.  Get as many backlines from relevant sites as possible – Bing’s attitude here is “the more, the merrier” but make sure the links are coming from relevant sites.

It takes time to get good rankings with Bing, so the sooner you align your website with Microsoft’s search policies, the better chance you will have to ride the wave of change to the top of Bing’s–and Yahoo’s–search results

OK what is up Doc? Microsoft now counts for nearly 50% of total visits at this blog. As I mentioned some days back this has been going on for some weeks now.

The visits according to my Yahoo! Indextools are all from Microsoft.com, WA, Washington and either they are clearing their coockies after each visit or there is big group of people testing/searching. These are all mostly one phrase searches, MSIE 7 and low screen resolutions.

The phrases that I am seeing are search, optimize, content, google and so on.

Sample:
Date:2008-07-05 16:11:19
IP/Host:65.55.109.73 (microsoft.com)
Country: us , WA, Washington
No. of visits: New visitor
Entry page:Optimize Your W…people – Part 2
Visit path:VIEW VISIT PATH – 1 page view
Referrer:http://search.live.com/results…
Search phrase: search
System:Windows 2003
Browser:MSIE 7.0
Language:English (United States)
Javascript:Enabled [1.5]
Monitor color:32 bit
Resolution:800×600
Cookies: Enabled

Finally I must say, now that Adobe has made Flash indexable Google launches their Flash indexing algorithm. As most SEO people know the big problem with Flash-based websites has been that they could not be properly indexed by the likes of Google and Yahoo. Flash websites have been favored by marketers and advertisers for a long time, because of the ability to create rich, interactive Web experiences and now they can be indexed by Google, now let’s see what Yahoo and MSN do.

Andy Atkins Kruger feels that Microsoft should drop the Yahoo deal “there’s no global benefit!”. But what does it mean? This post at Multilingual Search on the global effect of the Yahoo/Microsoft deal is one of the longest blog-posts I have seen, but however gives an in-depth answer into the real impact of all of this. The final verdict is “Drop Yahoo deal Microsoft, there’s no global benefit!”.

But why is that? Andy thinks it’s short and sweet “it seems like a deal driven by US egos”.

Great post Andy!

Mel Carson from Microsoft’s adCenter was in a Joe Cocker Video, How cool is that?! Joe Cocker the man who made the Beatles song “With a little help from my friends” famous at Woodstock, way back when. My question is, is Microsoft a step up or down?