Lead Generation and Internet Marketing in the UK

Internet and UK Search Engines

The internet advertising market size in the UK is reported as being $US 6.7 billion and a recent report revealed that lead generation is responsible for more than 1% of online ad spend in the UK. This suggests that internet marketers in the UK need to understand how the UK internet audience consumes online media and how best to engage them using a variety of media content across all the media channels. The UK, otherwise referred to as the United Kingdom, is officially called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island. It consists of five countries; England, Wales, Scotland and Northern island. It has an estimated population of 62 million and an internet population of 51.4 million which represents an 83% internet penetration. Google leads in terms of UK search engine market share and has 89.9% chunk of the market whilst Bing retains a 3.2% slice. Yahoo, Ask and Conduit have a 3%, 1.3% and 0.9% share respectively. The top three searches according to Google are “facebook”, “youtube” and “bbc”. Drilling deeper into the BBC searches reveal that searches regarding BBC news are top whilst Weather and Sport follow in that order. YouTube searches lead back to Facebook and the YouTube Converter which converts YouTube videos into MP3 format.

Facebook and YouTube

Facebook is the dominant social networking site in the UK with 29.7 million members and third in the world in terms of absolute membership numbers. Facebook receives 58 billion page views a month from UK visitors and the top interest category is Mobile Apps & Add-ons. This is followed by Online Video, Music & Audio, Reggae & Caribbean Music, Urban & Hip-Hop, Rock, Punk and How-to, DIY & Expert Content. This suggests that internet marketers in the UK could use Facebook to share expert content for the purposes of lead generation. The majority of Facebook users are male, of high income (£30,000 to £49,999), with some college education and between the ages of 25 to 44 years old. YouTube receives 31 million unique visitors every month from the UK and generates 4.4 billion page views. The demographics appear to be the same except with the male to female ratio which sees 62% male and 38% female. Audience interest categories are the same as Facebook which is not too surprising considering the interrelatedness of the two. The only additional interest categories that YouTube users seem to prefer is South Asian Music and Anime & Manga, which are animation and comics originating from Japan.

Twitter

The online demographics of twitter are virtually the same as Facebook and YouTube although there would appear to be a larger percentage of users earning more than £50,000 per year (25%). One must keep in mind the fact that twitter is predominantly used for internet marketing, search engine optimization and affiliate marketing purposes. The fact that there are more high earners may be more of a self promotional tool used to add weight to internet marketers claims of online riches that they alone can teach the world to earn, as earnings are an optional field for social media profiles.

Mobile Internet

There are 80.4 million mobile phone users in the UK which is over the population. It has been reported that UK smartphone penetration has more than doubled over the two years leading to June 2011 and that at least 20% of UK adults now own a smartphone. It is anticipated that with the expected increase in smartphone penetration, will come an increase in the amount of time people spend browsing the internet on their smartphones. This is further demonstrated by the increasing number of smartphone apps being downloaded by UK smartphone owners. The UK is responsible for 8% of the global smartphone apps download market according to research2guidance, mobile research specialists. More than 860 million smartphone apps were downloaded by UK users during 2010 with 105 million being paid apps responsible for £285 million in revenue. Research2guidance suggests that there is still more room for this market size to increase as the majority of mobile phone owners do not own a smartphone. These insights are good news for internet marketers entering the online industry in the UK as they can develop free and paid apps that provide relevant content to maximize their lead generation efforts.