Interactive marketing channels to watch this year

Another interesting piece of research by Forrester Research I would like to share with you. Earlier this week, Forrester, published its ‘Interactive Marketing Channels To Watch In 2007’ report. The company asked some 170 interactive marketers what interactive marketing channels they use – and plan to use.

The results show that most marketers still focus on interactive channels that have proven what they’re worth: display advertising, search engine marketing and e-mail marketing.

Typical Web 2.0 phenomena such as social networking, blogs and podcasts are becoming more important but for the time being they are clearly less adopted by the marketing community.

Forrester sees a few important reasons for this. One of them is the fact that many marketers seem to have a ‘wait and see’ approach: they only invest in these new channels when their peers/competitors start doing so (but then of course you miss out on the first mover advantage). A second reason is a lack of measurable case studies that show the virtues and effectiveness of these new channels.

The providers know what to do: invest in relevant cases and content, showing advertisers the success recipes and the ways to achieve them…

Forrester has a nice PowerPoint presentation resuming the main results of the report: http://www.forrester.com/Events/Content/0,5180,-1667,00.ppt