The Future of Marketing

A letter to the Editor from Zorik Gordon, co-founder and CEO of ReachLocal:

I'm amazed that search advertising, the most pervasive new marketing tool, was not included in your "New Basics of Marketing" feature [February].

Small and medium-size businesses are bailing out of traditional offline marketing mediums, like the yellow pages, in droves. That's because the vast majority of consumers are using the Internet to search for local goods and services. A recent study showed that 60 percent of customers are now using search engines as their primary source instead of telephone books.

So as important as it was to educate your readership on the basics of marketing, search adverting is an obvious omission. It's the biggest slice of the digital marketing pie and quickly trending upward.