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Online Marketing Firms Climb the Value Chain
Nov 27, 2008 (Biz-Community/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) --
Companies that specialise in providing online marketing technology services are climbing up the value chain as agencies and marketers start to count on them for more of their online marketing needs.
In the past, companies such as Acceleration existed to help agencies, publishers, and corporate clients with technical heavy-lifting that they did not have the resources to do themselves. Acceleration provided online marketing technology services in the areas of e-mail marketing, paid search marketing, online analytics and ad operations to help clients meet their online marketing goals.
Now, however, specialists in online marketing technology are increasingly asked to help their clients manage issues like training their staff and streamlining of workflow and processes. Clients are also looking for online marketing partners who can help them understand how the different elements of online marketing fit together.
So what's behind this trend? The simple answer is that the technology has become incredibly complex to manage and continues to evolve at a pace that threatens to leave behind people who don't specialise in the field. Take the example of an average small to medium sized agency that has 10 online marketing clients. Of these, three might be using the ad-serving platform A, while the rest could be running their operations on ad-serving platform B.
For such a firm, training staff to manage both product-sets as well as understanding the workflow behind it is expensive and unnecessary. As a result, many agencies are now looking for specialists in online marketing technology that can manage the platforms as well as the processes around them.
Publishers, agencies and corporate marketers are all asking themselves what their online business is and most are coming to the conclusion that it isn't trafficking, Web analytics or data management. These are all attractive areas to outsource to a third-party that has developed a competence around the technology that underpins online marketing.
Specialists in the field are able to stay up to date with the technology as it evolves, and more importantly, to leverage the latest applications and tools to produce real business benefits. They also understand the processes in the background, so can help their clients to leverage the technology to become more efficient.
Putting together the complex jigsaw puzzle of tools and technologies that comprise online marketing is probably one of the most important roles that a services company fulfils. Managing multiple vendors, technologies and service providers across areas such as email marketing, search, online advertising and Web analytics is challenging.
This is where the online marketing technology services companies comes in with end-to-end, custom solutions designed to meet complex industry needs.
It works with marketers and agencies as a central services hub stitching all the elements of their online marketing infrastructure - from technology and data integration to outsourced ad ops, email campaign deployment and bid management to custom training and consultation.
That frees the client to focus on what they do best, while resting easy in the knowledge that they have the best of breed technology and technical support to meet its online marketing goals.
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