The Big Three

BY ralph reefke
2011/05/02

I recently attended the tenth Digital Dealer Conference. As a technical guy working for a digital engagement agency I skipped over the seminars about dealer ops management and went in for the marketing discussions. I was filled up with stats, shown a couple new tactics, and sometimes even flabbergasted. After three days of talks the strongest impression I am left with is that we here at Dashboard are most definitely on top of the latest marketing trends, and I’ll be so bold as to say (shameless self promotion), even ahead of the curve.

Confirmed by the daily keynote discussions there were a few digital marketing themes that emanated the conference. The big three were SEO, Social Media, and Mobile.


SEO:

Yes, 8(?), 9(?), 10(?) years later we are still talking about SEO like this is some emerging trend that site owners should know about. I can pretty much guarantee that more than 50% of your sites traffic is coming from Google. If your digital partner isn’t employing SEO best practices at this point you might want to consider another partner. SEO is surprisingly straight forward and I’ve been preaching this for years. I don’t think I’m giving up any industry secrets by letting you know that relevancy is king. Always has been, and with all those smarty pants working at Google, always will be. If your development team is building your site to comply with W3 Web Standards there is very little technical hocus pokus involved.


Social Media:

Although this is continually evolving I think marketers and brands are starting to find their place within these spaces. We are finally getting over using social media as another channel for broadcasting advertising messages and are now engaging in two way conversations with consumers. As one dealer put it… “strategically I am engaged with social media for the same reasons I sponsor sports teams, to let people know I am part of the community. I mean, I wouldn’t put 10% off a service special on the back of a jersey.”


Mobile:

Hey! Mobile is the next big thing! How big you ask? I heard all kinds of conflicting stats projecting its bigness but lets just say it is going to be REALLY BIG! Truth is that more and more people are buying smart phones and tablets and that within the next couple years most of the market will be penetrated with these devices. Mobile searches are through the roof! People are spending more time in front of their mobile devices than in front of their TV! Interestingly, not so much eComm happening yet, and all the current transactions are being dominated by eBay. So what should we do? Watch and learn. As the technology changes and people continue to develop interesting applications we will study how everyone interacts with their devices. There are some really interesting location based applications coming out and I can imagine a future where you will be able to get a search return by pointing your device at any object in the real world. Time will tell…

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  • 02/05/11

    Darryl Patterson says:

    Google Goggles does just that, snap a pic and you get Google search results. Pretty awesome mashup of Google services if you ask me.
  • 03/05/11

    Ralph says:

    True that Darryl but it is in its very infancy and has a very long way to go. Have you tried a Goggles search recently? Before writing this comment I snapped a shot of a golf ball here on my desk and got a zero return that presented an onion, a light bulb, a sunset, and white piece of paper as a "close image match". I am dreaming about the day where, like the "Monocle" in Yelp's iPhone app, Google (or whomever) superimposes a return like this... http://www.google.ca/search?q=golf+ball&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Now that would be sweet!