According to MarketingProfs:

Interactive marketing spend is expected to reach nearly $25.6 billion in 2009—and nearly $55.0 billion in 2014, when it will account for 21% of all marketing spend, up from 12% in 2009—according to Forrester’s projections in its recent report, “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014.”

Marketers will be shifting budgets away from traditional and toward interactive media—search, online display ads, email, social media, and mobile marketing—bringing about a decline in overall advertising budgets during the forecast period, Forrester said.

That trend is also a reflection of marketers’ growing recognition of where consumers are spending their time, according to the report: “Marketers are getting better at balancing channel investments with consumer media time.”

Though people typically spend equal amounts of their media time—34-35% in 2009—with television and the internet (including at work), TV ad spending is about four times that of internet ad spending (31% vs. 7%).

MarketingProfs says that interactive is growing at traditional advertising’s expense. Read the details here.

This just in from BtoBOnline:

Natural search adherents learn the value of tweaks and tweets

It’s not news that marketing budgets have been cut to the bone, nor that even paid search expenditures are in a slump.

What is new, and slowly building over at least the past six months, is the realization by marketers that search engine optimization—the “free” kind of Web site tweaking based on content, metatags and link-building that helps a company get recognized in search queries—can return big, enduring benefits.

“Because of the recession, there has been an acceleration [in attempts] to figure out proper Web site optimization due to its lower cost overall and higher ROI,” said Aaron Kahlow, founder and CEO of the Online Marketing Summit conferences.

SEO GETS LEADS
“It’s forced us to ask what is the most effective way- to get traffic leads and sales,” he said. “And there’s almost no one out there who won’t say SEO is now No. 1 by far, with e-mail a close second.”

Besides attributing this burgeoning focus to the recession, Kahlow believes marketers are simply outgrowing old assumptions.

“It doesn’t take a lot of skill for the mainstream marketer to get started with paid search,” he said. “They’re used to paying for ads, and also perhaps some got burned by the SEO work done for them by snake oil salesmen. But today, there’s a gradual awakening to the virtues of natural search.”

This looks like my day to plug our friends! Deltina Hay, of Dalton Publishing, just sent RefreshWeb an invitation to her book release next week. Deltina is an amazing woman, combining editorial expertise, web development expertise, and social media expertise. Like many of us who’ve had multiple careers, she’s got skills AND experience, and this book looks like a powerful guide to understanding/utilizing social media and the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

“A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization,” by Deltina Hay, Dalton Publishing.

This book will show you how to use the tools of Web 2.0 to build a successful Web presence. From Squidoo to YouTube, Facebook to WordPress, wikis to widgets, blogs to RSS feeds, business owners, authors, publishers, students, PR and marketing professionals can learn to apply and integrate these tools by themselves. Gone are the days of relying on Web developers! This book arms you with the nuts and bolts of the new, open-source Internet through hands-on, real-world examples. And, the companion CD is packed with links to other resources, directories of Social Websites, and fillable forms and worksheets to help you map your strategy. You will be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is!

Great tweet from buzz-worthy Dana Marruffo at Buzz Public Relations in Austin, pointing to this article on optimizing press releases. This post exemplifies social media best practices: she’s helping her followers do something for which they would ordinarily have to pay Dana the big bucks. Why give away your expertise? Because it makes people remember that you’re the expert that told them the inside scoop. If people have budget, they’d generally rather outsource to an expert, and if they don’t have budget, the best thing we can do is to help them become more successful.

The article is by Barbara Krause, and appears on the Open Forum for small business…this excerpt is the obvious stuff, the how to section is just great.

Putting out a traditional press release in the clutter of information jamming the Internet is worse than trying to have a quiet conversation at a rock concert. Today your release needs to be optimized for the web. That’s because the web is where customers and reporters get much of their information. Consider this: Over 80% of online purchases start with a web search (Forrester Research), and online search is the number one source for journalists to obtain additional story information (Bennett & Company). Using search engine optimization (SEO), you can help ensure your press release is easily found by customers, reporters and the robots that crawl the web to deliver search results.

SEO Success: Sign Of A Healthy Corporate Culture is a very interesting article by Gord Hotchkiss. Often articles on SEO seem to be rehashing the same things and offer little insight, but this one is good. Really good. I’ve been thinking back over the last >3 years I’ve been at RefreshWeb, and I would say that this is pretty accurate. A can-do attitude and culture of action and responsibility within a company correlates strongly with not only their success in ranking well online, but in their overall success.

There’s always a lot of talk about where the world is headed, how it will affect us, and, to a lesser extent, how we’ll be meeting the marketing demands that go along with this change. Remember a few years back when people started talking about mobile, and it seemed ridiculous? I get mad at my iPhone because I can’t watch live weather satellite from the Yahoo! weather app. Mad that I can’t remotely log into my work computer to see something on an email — never mind that that same check is slow from the T1-speed connection at home. This video from HP is a few minutes of fascinating statistics about how the world is changing and the speed at which we’re seeing technology rise and expand into the developing world.

This got sent to us courtesy of the lovely and talented Scott Berg. He runs The Changing Face of Digital Media & Marketing blog over at HP.

I know that what we do isn’t cheap. It’s a significant investment with long-lasting results and measurable results, as opposed to an ad (except for the significant investment part). And, it works so well I gave up the ad agency model 7 years ago, and started what was one of the first B2B SEO agencies. However, if you don’t have any idea what professional search marketing services cost, and you’re getting calls every week telling you that you can have an “optimized web site” for $160 a month, then there’s a big disconnect when you look at our published SEO pricing. An SEO agency may not be cheap, but what’s the cost of not being visible on the whole range of terms people are using to try and find your products or services?

Here’s an unsolicited email from a vendor whom I’m sure would be much less expensive–I’d be glad to put you in touch with sweetanglina@gmail.com (sic) if you’d like:

My self Angelina Jacob and my team wants to do organic seo work . so could you like provide me more details about this cause i want to start this work as soon as possible and we are professional of this organic seo work…………