Over the next 18 months the commercialisation of the market will be mixed, here’s why…
- Most brands currently don’t use the web to advertise so miss out on reaching many of their target consumers just at the moment when they are in the right mindset. For the brands that change their approach they’ll enjoy a loud share of voice and strong connections to their consumers. However many will simply continue this year with the same marketing strategy as last year, missing the opportunity to change and the cost savings this will create.
- For sophisticated online marketers there is no shortage of opportunity. There is a large amount of targeted advertising inventory available, with media owners able to offer greater precision by focussing the advertising impacts on the sections of their sites that match the right target consumer. Few media websites have sponsored sections, giving brands the scope to ‘own’ channels of content.
- There is also a clear passion and energy among the web publishers. Media groups such as Styria display an eagerness and enthusiasm to adapt to the needs of their advertisers in a way far more responsive than the Scandinavian and Western European markets at the same stage in their development.
- Marketers focussed on lead generation have the familiar range of pay-per-click tools from the global search engines, but there are also strong local alternatives. A good illustration of this is the contextual search business Xclaim that weaves advertising content smartly into the editorial structure of the text, giving consumers the option of an advertising message if they want to explore further. Like search it delivers the message just to the people who are interested, but unlike search it does not limit its reach to those actively looking: instead it takes the marketing message out of the search engine and back into the main editorial of a website. This is an advanced proposition for digital marketers who are looking for even smarter ways to use the new media channels and it’s revealing that in spite of the tiny market size in Croatia, clever advertisers are already applying it.