Even with a busy schedule I try and keep an eye on movement in the tech industry. Where money is being placed shows the direction of the market and what the results of all these industry gurus research and decisions are being backed by speculation. Follow the money and you're following the end results of all these great minds. In an article on SIIA.net there's a comparative breakdown of the last three years worth of investments in different sectors of technology that leads in with some analysis on Q1 2018. Out of the gate, 2018 is up 124% compared to 2017 and the money is on tech enabled services up 207%. Marketing, analytics, database and information services have unprecedented increases. With stronger consumer confidence the market outlook for technology related goods and services is very healthy, as a consequence advertising and marketing via tech soars along side. Seems obvious to those involved with technology that this isn't going anywhere but up. Take a read through the numbers, what they mean is a future more interwoven with tech than anyone can imagine. The article is from Matt Kinsman, former vice president at Connectiv now at Accruent.com citing info from JEGI.com.
Although this article is on the subject of content marketing it overlaps into all areas of digital marketing. I found this great article by Richard Darell while doing research for a strategic marketing plan for a new project. There's a detailed infographic included by ZenContent that helped me form the basis of my plan. I was having a touch of writers block getting started on this marketing plan and can see when a business becomes too close to itself to be able to write effectively for their own products. Whether it is the lack of time or just the need for a fresh perspective, consider hiring professional content writers from ZenContent. Promoting your website is essentially content marketing. Quality content gets a new customer to the door and engages the the ones that have already made purchases. Add a great domain name and building more engaging content provides the search engines with a bigger target to hit and will dynamically improve your SEO efforts.
Read more about content marketing at BitRebels.
2023 WTF - What's The Future
Future predictions are often made from technical analysis, which is more or less mapping past behavior to numerical values to provide direction over time. Consider that everything is in a constant state of motion. Motion in this sense in the flow of money, where resources are being placed and reallocated from.
As a simplified example, let's compare money and water without all the complexities. The amount of water on the planet is always the same. Sometimes it's stored in lakes, reservoirs, oceans, people, crops, but there's always the same amount of water on the planet. You can't destroy it, you can pollute it, clean it, and what evaporates here ends up as rain somewhere else. Glaciers melt, oceans rise etc, but still the same amount of water exists.
The supply of money is much more complicated, but this is a simple example. When I hear that money was wiped away or billions lost from various investment vehicles, most of that growth was fictitious to begin with, sinking below initial investment levels to actual value is the real loss numbers and those dollars end up being reallocated just like water. Crypto was and is a Ponzi scheme. And, those base crypto investment dollars have resurfaced as luxury homes, vehicles, lavish lifestyles by the people who got in at the beginning. Sorry to those of you who lost and thought this was a way to get rich quick, i.e. get something for nothing, but nature has a way of balancing the equation. Money flowed into these investments, but that doesn't justify the value of them. A stock with a P/E ratio of 2000 times earnings is a mistake of the same sort. Long way to a point, but follow the money and make sure your future investments are backed by solid principals.
The future holds a correction in the markets and in so many other areas. Gartner forecasts IT spending to grow 5% overall in 2023 with 11% placed in software development. Read the article here and decide where and why to put your development resources. Domain names are the cornerstone of developing a new company, a new brand, product line or income stream. Get the best names while you still can.
The key method of developing your business is advertising. Call it integrated marketing with all the other forms of getting your message out, but it still boils down to advertising, which is making it public and memorable.
You may advertise in a trade magazine or on a billboard, but your website is the only form of advertising that's constantly available to your audience. Your domain name is the focal point for all of these marketing components, at the corner stone, and the foundation from where you build your brand upon.
Get a dot com name. Other extensions may gain popularity in 20 years, but for the foreseeable future your marketing efforts will end up in the junk folder. Even in tech where .io and .ai have some traction with start ups, it translates into they're in beta, not ready for primetime. As a decision maker can you back your choice of doing business with an organization that's not really established?
Read my last post about Branding for Authority and Affinity for more information. Here are some premium domain names that I have for sale.
As we approach the 4th quarter of fiscal year 2015, and soon to be at the midway point of this decade, I started to look at the predictions and indicators for internet growth by year 2020. Sounds futurist the year 2020 and I think we are starting to enter into the steeper slope of the curve now. In 2010 the internet had 1.7 billion users, today it has a little over 3.1 billion and by 2020 it should be at 5 billion. Check out the stats by country here on InternetWorldStats.com.
Forecasting the future of the internet is that hard to predict just look at what we do and ask yourself are we going to be doing any less of it. Twenty-five great points are listed in this article on Marketing in 2020 by Jeff Beer of FastCompany.com. By looking at marketing we can see the direction society is taking by observing the force trying to get in-front of the mass. Some key points I took away were virtual reality is reality, brand transparency and through technology it's about to get really personal.
Don't forget to consider the growth of the machine usage with the Internet of Things IoT. Both machine and human usage almost double in the next 5 years!
Advertising in 2018 and Beyond With the Super Bowl Lll just around the corner, I am always interested in what 30 seconds of air time is selling for and what the best commercials will be. Last year companies spent up to 5 million to get in front of the 111 million viewers watching in the US, and then their money was gone. Advertising online has more than begun it's shift upward while other mediums, aside from radio, are sloping down. In an article on MediaPost.com The Winterberry Group states 2018 will be the year of digital media and spending will surpass all off lime marketing. In 2016 online spending surpassed television, now it's growing overall. That's because online advertising works and everyone is on all the time. As a business owner you know you need to be online, but finding your customers in this digital ocean is the next challenge. SmartInsights.com just released a digital marketing mega-trends guide and they have several digital marketing tool kits. The article was scientific citing the effectiveness of Amazon's trial and errors as they grew. One point not expressed enough is to acquire a memorable and easy to pronounce, easy to pass along domain name. (Note: KeyInsight.com is for sale now. Don't delay building your brand, what you put off now, will later only be more difficult and increasingly competitive to navigate.
Go Eagles!
I have been looking at domain name predictions that were made in 2016 to measure how well the analysts are keeping up with actual market movements in 2017. Being now that we're enter into 3rd quarter, it's good time for a halftime report. Overall, the results are on track and moving in the right direction. It's a difficult area to measure as most sales figures are not reported and have NDA's attached to them, but corporate purchases are up and companies are strategically placing themselves for additional accessibility into mobile and online services as workforce's are more distributed along with trying to increase their customer base.
Take a look at these 3 sources and draw your own conclusions. Huge growth is anticipated going to 2024. Strategyr's Domain Name Market Trends Verisign's Domain Name Registrations in Q1 Hover's Domain Name Expert's Point of View