The week before last saw the annual Ad:Tech conference take place in San Francisco. Lasting from Monday 11^th to Wednesday 13^th April, AOL Advertising’s global ad platform provided an interactive forum and exhibition for those involved in advertising technology and digital marketing. Every year the Ad:Tech conference focuses on all the latest development in social, mobile, email, viral, cross-channel, application-based and geo-location marketing, as well as looking at improvements and progression with regards to SEO, social media, geosocial and gaming. Across these topics the conference offered the opportunity for discussions and debates concerning the direction of the internet marketing industry.

As reported by Brafton News, relevant content was a key issue that kept arising in many of the conference sessions – whatever the subject. It was widely agreed that producing relevant content is a challenging area for many internet marketers. Furthermore it seems that the relevancy of content is becoming ever more important in obtaining those vital clicks. Advice mainly focused on the need for in depth research into the interests and concerns of online audiences. This knowledge will equip advertisers with the necessary understanding to produce relevant content that engages site users.

Unsurprisingly, the conference also shone a light on the increasing use of social media in the internet advertising arena, in particular highlighting how Facebook is becoming a key player. In the hope of harnessing the widespread success of social media, more and more companies are using it to attract traffic to their businesses, and this was a big topic of discussion during the entire conference.

There was still plenty of buzz around email marketing, which continues to be a profitable and relevant marketing technique. In fact, vice president of marketing at ExactTarget, Jeff Rohrs, shared recent research revealing that 93% of consumers are email subscribers, and all age groups are increasing their email usage. An important area in the world of email is to combine it with the ever-growing social networking sites to increase interest. Many brands have employed simple methods of pairing the two, such as including a social button within marketing messages to make it easy for recipients to become fans and followers via social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Mobile phone marketing also featured strongly as it continues to grow rapidly, now being used either together with or instead of social media. Experts at the event also agreed that the mobile channel is perfect for connecting internet marketing to the offline world, making the service truly universal.

So as the online marketing industry continuously grows and evolves, the need for quality and innovation continues to increase and these are now the huge drivers for success in a performance-based market.