Online Marketing for Marketers

One cannot write on the marketing industry today and not comment on our now “official recession”. So, I’d like to take a different angle than most and focus on the positive elements of the turmoil ahead for 2009. Here are the three thoughts that actually have me re-energized about the coming year:

Weed Out the Weak
As with any disease, war or difficult time, the weak and unworthy quickly perish. For the online marketing space, this is particularly good. We have so many fly-by-night vendors, pseudo-consultants and companies with products and business models that you’d think it’s 1999 all over again. To prove the point, all you have to do is walk through one the exhibit hall floors of a major show and try to figure out what any of the vendor like “Orange Crush” or “Blue River” actually do.

The good news here is if you have a strong product, exemplary skills and a decent game plan both client-side and agency-side players will thrive after the shakeout and opportunity will abound…
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With the volatility in the economy these days, marketers are being held more accountable for the dollars being spent online. Quality has replaced quantity, and getting your arms around the ROI from each campaign is a much more pressing issue. Fortunately, given a proper strategy, marketers can obtain the tools needed to help them spend wiser.

Developing a campaign tracking strategy is a common challenge for organizations. However, this strategy is fundamental to the success of your campaign analysis. A campaign that is tagged improperly will yield incomplete data which negates a marketer’s ability to track ROI and often leaves marketers with unanswered questions about their campaigns. Educated guesses need to be replaced with data-driven decisions as it pertains to what works and what doesn’t as you embark down the path of campaign optimization. Read more

If you are attempting to generate more leads and sales through your website, you need to pay attention to website conversion. In my opinion, website conversion is the most important element of online marketing.

Simply stated, website conversion refers to the percentage of visitors who take a particular action. Let’s say you conversion goal was to have visitors schedule a free consultation by filling out an email form. If you had 1000 visitors and 20 of them filed out the email form, your conversion rate would be 2% ( 20 / 1000 = 2%). Read more

One of the big questions of the moment is how marketers should tackle this thing called “social media.” Many are taking a wait-and-see approach while the more daring jump in head first. One such braveheart is Terra Chips, who is launching its “Chip in for Change” campaign on Facebook on October 28.

Here’s a taste of this effort as served up by MediaPost: Read more

One of the questions I often get from clients is if the Google Analytic platform is sufficient for their needs. The answer usually depends on the nature of their site and what they would like to accomplish business-wise with it. Many B2B web sites are primarily concerned with promoting their corporate brand and lead generation. Their conversion funnels tend to be relatively simple, tracking a visitor through to a lead for example. Interestingly, many organizations only use 10-20% of the overall functionality of their web analytics platform. Read more

Hello everyone. I thought some people might be interested in my free Webinar this Wednesday about Corporate Blogging Strategies:

http://www.businessol.com/webinars/default.html .

Looking forward to seeing everyone at OMS in Feb!