I like Target Marketing Magazine’s research summary overviewing the growth factors in SEM, SEO, online advertising (a.k.a., Pay-Per-Click) and Email Marketing which are among the listed 16 online marketing trends.

More than 80% of marketers are using paid search and SEO and plan to expand search into more segments. As consumers search more online, Google’s AdWord inventory continues to grow.  All music to marketers’ ears as you expand your paid search and SEO efforts. 

Online advertising, “performance-based” media buys and integrated email marketing are also slated for substantial growth through 2014.

These four trends are what ICS is all about and what we’ve been preaching for increased sales lift, better Marketing ROI and overall business growth.  Now, direct marketers across the country are finally starting to see these four tenets as "hot trends for 2010" according to Deliver Magazine.   

Targeting — With our advanced analytics, data management tools and direct marketing experience, you can target on a one-to-one level with specific customers and prospects using a tailored offer at the right time in the customer’s preferred channel.  Plus, you can focus your marketing dollars on targeting your most valuable prospects. 

Measurement/Analysis – Data not only gives you the clearest view of your customers for targeted marketing, but collecting and analyzing data is critical in matching-back sales to specific marketing efforts.  Now more than ever, marketers are on the hook to prove that every dollar you spend is growing the business. 

Integration –  Marketers who execute cross channel campaigns experience a 50 – 400% better response rate than singularly focused campaigns.  To learn about integration trends and what leading companies are doing in multichannel integration, view our on-demand webinar:  "Transforming Practices in Integrated Marketing Communications."

Prospecting — I like the quote in this article, "Today, everybody at every stage of life is open to marketing."  However, you can’t have great sales lead generation without well-honed targeting AND channel integration.  Lead generation is where it all comes together… in my opinion, this is where this article misses the 2010 mark BIG TIME.  Plus, online lead generation didn’t even get a mention!   SEO, SEM and paid search (where customers are actively searching your product/service) are only getting hotter in 2010 and beyond.

The focus of today’s message is using Legacy In Market Shopper data in the Automotive Space.  Typically, Automobile Manufacturers use the freshest data coming from sources like CarsDirect and Autobytel when prospecting for automotive sales.  This makes sense, as they are likely to still be shopping for a vehicle … and influencing the prospect to consider your brand is a proven email and direct marketing strategy. 

Through the past few years, we have developed an enhanced legacy database for automotive prospecting.  While this might not make sense to you at first, our experience with the data has proven it to be a source of significant power for automotive prospecting:

• First, In-Market Shopper data represents a massive pool of people that historically shop for new cars.  As we know in this space from our years of registration data experience, historic new car shoppers are most likely still new car buyers.  That factor by itself is powerful.
• Second, Brand History is a very important indicator of future buying preferences.  If you have a history of considering Mazda (for example), you are very likely to consider the brand for future new car considerations.  
• Finally, with Enhanced Data, we can utilize shopping history and clustering products such as Mosaic or Personicx to analyze and identify those top clusters of the brand competitive set of the product you are focusing on.   A fairly straight forward approach that has proven to yield excellent results.

While legacy In-Market Shopping data by itself is considered weak, we can use our experience and data enhancement capabilities to turn this data into very productive contributors to your email and direct marketing initiative.   While you can take my word for it, I encourage you to consider testing these approaches in your next email or direct marketing intiative.