2008 is set to be yet another year of massive growth for South Africa's online market. The investment that Google is making into building a direct presence in South Africa is just one indication of the growing maturity and viability of our online market.

As the online market gains critical mass, South African marketers are not only using online as a more significant part of their marketing mix, but they're also using the channel in increasingly sophisticated ways. The trends outlined below provide some insight into how we expect the market to develop over the year to come.

1. Rise of social media continues

Social networking has enjoyed explosive growth over the past three years, but there's no sign that it is levelling off yet. Ad spending on social networks in the US is expected show a growth rate of 70%, climbing to $1.6-billion in 2008 from $920-million in 2007.

Social networking sites burst into the mainstream of South Africa's online world with a vengeance during 2007. For December, Facebook recorded 722,279 unique users and 352-million page views from South Africa.

We can expect the social networking trend to gain even more traction during 2008, as even more users flock to social networking sites and tools. We may see the rise of new social networking environments during the year, including a rise to prominence by local alternatives to the likes of MySpace and Facebook.

The challenge that lies ahead for South African marketers is to tap into this massive audience by using social media to interact and engage with their customers. They need to learn listen to customers to gauge their needs and interests, and respond quickly and appropriately.

2. New search avenues open

Search engine marketing has proven its value as one of the most flexible and powerful tools at the online marketer's disposal. During 2008, we can expect to see many marketers look beyond traditional search towards new tools and environments such as mobile search and social search.

Developments in the nascent mobile search market should be interesting to watch in the year to come. The big online players seem to have flagged it as an important growth market. Microsoft, for example, recently made headlines with its plans to buy Fast Search and Transfer, a small firm with a mobile search product, for $1.2 billion. Google and Yahoo! both started developing mobile search offerings several years ago.

3. New metrics for success come to the fore

In the past, online marketers have generally relied on success metrics that are easy to capture and quantify, such as page impressions, click-throughs and conversions. But in a world where social media holds sway and our goals are to engage with our customers and build long-term relationships, these measurements don't give us all the information that we need to understand how successful we have been.

Metrics that help us get our arms around the slippery concept of 'engagement' are likely to become increasingly important. Some examples include how much time visitors spend interacting with a company's online presence, how many pages they visit, how often they come back, and whether they download content or forward our emails onto their friends.

4. Rich media gathers momentum

Today, South African marketers can look beyond traditional click-through banners to rich media ads that contain video, games and audio. These rich media ads allow them to interact with their customers in deeper ways and rise above the clutter.

Thanks to falling bandwidth prices and rising broadband penetration, we can expect to see rich media ads (including streaming video) become even more popular in the year to come.

5. Mobile internet gets moving

The mobile internet has been slower to take off in South Africa than many industry observers may have expected when the cellular operators launched their first data services. However, there are signs that the mobile Internet is finally starting to take off.

The prices for mobile bandwidth are increasingly competitive, cellular phones with fast 3G/HSDPA/Wi-Fi connectivity are affordable and freely available, and the user experience has improved dramatically thanks to smartphone developments such as big colour screens and ergonomic keyboards.

As a result, more and more people are accessing the Internet from their phones for a range of applications from email to online banking, from reading news headlines to buying tickets for an entertainment event.

The mobile internet will present a range of exciting opportunities for those advertisers that learn to use it in an effective manner. The size of South Africa's cellular subscriber base - at about 35-million people - dwarfs the size of the internet subscriber base.

6. Integration of online and offline media

In the year to come, marketers will increasingly look at online and offline channels as complementary, rather than competing, elements of the marketing mix. Their aim will be to reach the audience, wherever it is, with a consistent message that meets their needs as well as your business objectives.

Users' attention is divided across a host of channels, and many people multitask as they consume media, for example, watching TV in the background or in a window on the PC while they surf the Web. Marketers need to direct advertising spend across a range of channels to get their attention.

The big challenge will be to understand how marketers can use cross-channel marketing to improve relationships with customers and to achieve goals, from brand-building through customer conversion and retention.

7. Taking aim at behavioural targeting

Behavioural targeting should experience sharp growth in South Africa this year. Behavioural targeting uses information collected on a user's web-browsing behaviour (for example pages visited or searches conducted) to choose advertisements to display to that individual.

This form of targeting allows advertisers to aim their ads at the users that are most likely to be receptive to their message. It can be combined with other forms of targeting, such as demographics and geography for even more effect.

Up until now, conventional wisdom was that the South African web environment is too small to support effective behavioural marketing because the concept works best where a big audience is active across a large selection of web sites and pages. However, the growing number of web sites and users in South Africa is making the concept increasingly viable for local marketers.

Yes, but the economy could impact advertising.

Offline and online media are often perceived to be in a fierce battle for advertising spend. There's more than a little truth to that perception: online advertising is on the increase and a lot of its growth is coming at the expense of traditional media.

Indeed, we've seen the rise of the new media giants such as Google and Yahoo! over the past ten years, as well as a scramble by traditional television and print players to maintain their market share and reinvent themselves for the digital age.

Yet, from the perspective of the advertiser, online and offline channels are complementary and essential elements of the marketing mix. For the advertiser, then, the trick is to get the balance of spending right between these media and to use them in a coordinated way to achieve its objectives.By taking an integrated approach to online and offline advertising, marketers can maximise the effectiveness of their spending across both channels. It's all about reaching the customer - wherever he or she might be - with a consistent message that meets their needs as well as your business objectives.

The changing consumer

One principle that I've returned to several times in my columns on Marketingweb is that our most important job as marketers is to re-engage with our customers and prospects by adapting to their needs, desires and behaviours.

We need to understand where they're coming from and listen to them, understand them and take what they are saying to heart. And what many of these customers are doing is using a blend of online and offline media to meet their needs in their professional and personal lives. From the customer's perspective, online and offline channels form part of an interconnected media experience.

They talk on their cellphones while they surf the web. They watch a sports broadcast in a window on their PC screens while they do their online banking. They read a newspaper at their desks at work and then go online to find out more about an article or ad that caught their attention.

Watching television while online (58.3% of respondents) is the most common offline activity combined with internet consumption, according to a recent online survey by US-based Burst Media.

In this multitasking environment where consumers attention is divided between numerous media, marketers need to direct advertising spend across a range of channels to get their attention. Many advertisers have experienced great success by delivering coordinated messages across different platforms, such as television and online, to get attention from their audiences.

Measurability matters

Another issue recurring in my columns is the importance of tracking and measuring the return on investment that you experience from your advertising investment. Effective integration of online and offline campaigns can provide you with some interesting metrics for the effectiveness of your traditional media advertising.

Online data such as visits to your website and search term content can provide valuable insight into whether your audience responded to your television ad the way you had hoped, for example. Research published by Hitwise and Yahoo! Search Marketing in 2006 benchmarked the use of search by Orange Retail, Sky and The AA in the UK over six months, and found that these organisations achieved superior results by mixing online and offline media.

An AA TV campaign, for example, created a halo effect which benefited other AA brands online with a steep climb in the number of searches for 'aa loans' and 'aa breakdown cover'. Orange, meanwhile, saw a sharp increase in internet searches for a specific mobile phone handset it advertised in a press campaign.

Closing thoughts

Although it is important to achieve integration of your online and offline channels, you also need to acknowledge the shift taking place from one mass market to many niche markets. Marketers who manage to address these fragmented niche markets through effective use of the online and offline vehicles they have access to are the ones who will enjoy the best results.

Marketers need to acknowledge that the way the audience consumes information has changed, and respond appropriately. The big challenge we face in the coming months is to understand how we can use cross-channel marketing to improve our relationships with our customers and to achieve our goals, from brand-building through to customer conversion and retention. The ideal place to start with is clearly defined objectives across the multiple channels we will use to reach customers and prospects.