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‘Dot brand’ gTLDs: owning the territory

 

The new gTLD expansion has provoked some ‘so what?’ responses, so Roland LaPlante is here to discuss the main benefits of a ‘dot brand’ and review some important marketing trends.

Over the past three years, you are likely to have read countless words on the expansion of the internet’s address system, where classic top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com and .info, and .de and .co.uk, will be joined by hundreds of new generic domains such as .organic and .black, geographic domains including .london and .vegas, and .brand domains such as .nike and .swatch.

Against this background, there are four important marketing trends to consider. First, there are higher levels of online engagement than ever before. More people are online. Every day, you can do more stuff on the internet. The result? People are spending more time online. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

Second, corporate sites—we all visit them—are getting bigger and more complicated. This is convenient for the corporate types, but difficult for customers as they sometimes have to navigate around the 99% of unwanted content to get to the one morsel they want.

Third, big data. We have better tracking tools than ever. More data and better tools give us the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff and to learn useful things about what our customers are doing online.

And finally, we are learning—yet again—about the fickleness of social networks. Even now, teenagers are moving away from Facebook to a place their parents and grandparents haven’t heard of yet. So, it’s no longer enough, or even cool, to ask people to like you on Facebook.

Given this confluence of marketing trends, how do marketers and brand managers engage with prospects and customers online and create the ultimate experience in a more sustainable fashion?

The answer is to graduate from owning a website to owning an entire internet TLD dedicated to your brand. Read more from Source