I always enjoy reading reports about the future of local online advertising and how much it’s predicted to grow into the future. Here’s a real bonus in that it’s a single chart from eMarketer.com that compares the projected growth rate from three of the biggest researchers in the industry.
Borrell and BIA/Kelsey are focused on the U.S. and are relatively close in their views of the future. No matter whose numbers you look at, any double digit growth is impressive and with the next three years each predicted to grow over 13% we can expect some exciting things to happen in local market automation.
In fact, the only way to sustain and control this much growth is through an automated process that combines the old world of print with the new world of mobile, social, search, landing pages, e-promo pages, microsites and whatever else comes along in the next three years.
In addition to having an ad building system for your retailers that combines the print with online, so they don’t have to go to different marketing portals and see completely different assets and templates. The real key is to have a system that hosts the html pages so you can track, modify and continue to control the message.
In print it’s fairly easy to approve and ad that has run but a landing page can be approved in one minute and changed the next and you have no way of knowing unless you host those pages. In addition, if you host the pages you know the results of each effort, you change the landing pages to react to those results and instantly re-publish the improved effort to your entire channel. It’s much easier to manage co-op approvals, too.
It’s time to grow and control local online marketing.