Last week, I attended a webinar on the future of marketing. While you have to deal with what is going on in marketing in your daily business life, it’s also important to know what you’re working toward. You can’t get somewhere without knowing where you’re going so I thought it would be interesting to share some of this information with you.

3 ways Web 3.0 is changing the marketing landscape

1. Bye-bye keywords. While keywords will still play a role in search engine marketing, Web 3.0 is more than the keywords itself. Founder of Bintro.com claims that semantics will play more of a vital role than keywords. What he means by semantics is that he sees copy going away from keywords and more towards conversational sentences that make sense. We’ve seen some of this already with blogging. Blogs tend to have more of a conversational tone that readers on all levels can enjoy and learn from.

2. Going mobile. The United States has been a mobile society for quite some time now, but the future of mobile phone use across the globe is expected to increase. The widening reach of mobile phone use will be answered by Web 3.0 with more and more transactions taking place on mobile phones. It is expected that 50% of the world will be using a mobile phone by the end of 2010. Again, this is not in the United States. This is the world.

Think about what mobile phone transactions will do for business. Picture this. You’re out to dinner with your spouse. While you’re in the lobby waiting for your table, you strike up a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to you and learn he is the ideal client for your product or service. You hook him and he bites. He wants to buy. You pull out your cell phone and process his purchase with his credit card and your cell phone–all in the lobby of the restaurant. You can complete the transaction right now while the sale is hot, rather than having to send an invoice when you return to the office tomorrow or send them to your website and hope they make the purchase.

3. Videos marketing. We’ve seen the popularity of videos emerge online with the invention of sites such as YouTube. Web 3.0 is going to take the use of videos one step further when it comes to marketing. It’ll be less about interrupting your customer’s experience and more about creating an experience. Instead of buying a pop-up window ad that pops up when they type in a web address or land on a website, your video ad will be on the website they’re visiting. Most Internet users realize that if they click on a banner ad, for example, that they will be directed away from the site they are on. With a video ad, however, when they are ready to hear and see what you have to say, they can hit the play button and watch the video without ever leaving the site they have come to visit. This enhances the customer’s visit to the site rather than interrupting it.

Change is on the horizon in how you market and conduct business online. It may change the way you write your marketing copy, accept payments for your products and services, or the types of advertising you buy for your business. Web 2.0 changed the way we do everything online and Web 3.0 continues to alter our approach. Be aware of these changes and start to prepare your marketing efforts now so your business benefits from these changes in the future.