Top 10 for Online Marketing Success in 2009

Still uncertain how to start your online-marketing efforts this year? Here's some practical guidance that will soon have you on your way to success.

10. Borrow and Share

Share your content, borrow others'. This is a really simple concept, but due to decades of a winner-take-all, competitive scarcity-model mentality, it's a hard philosophy for most marketers to embrace.

All of us have some content that's worth getting out, so we should share it with anyone willing to post it on their site. In the same vein, we should borrow content from others who have supporting information that will enhance the experience of our Web-site customers.

Even those whose business is information—publishers—can't cover all things at all times and need to share. If The New York Times is willing to aggregate and share content from other publications, then it should be possible for the rest of us to do the same.

Recommendation: Find the top two or three publishers/bloggers/reporters who cover your industry and grab an RSS feed. Insert it in your news section of your Web site. This may not produce any results, but it will help you get used to—and begin to understand the value of—the shared-content concept.

9. User-Generated Content as a Strategy

With folks out of work and looking for ways to engage, what better time to encourage participation? You might be surprised to find how many of your customers are more than happy to give insight on their experience with a product, service, or solution that you offer. So why not encourage them to share?

Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and many more sites have become brand leaders over much more established brands simply by embracing a user-generated-content strategy. Now, it's your turn.

Recommendation: Pick a product, service, or area of interest on your site and, with the help of a 30-day trial from one of the many ratings/reviews software vendors, start getting content from your customers. With no additional tech support or manpower hours on your end, you will have expanded your online offerings.

8. Cost-Conscious Search

Recently I heard the folks at Hitwise, a company that monitors online trends, including search (like Nielsen for TV), mention how search patterns predicted the downturn in our economy: low-cost keyword search phrases had a huge spike starting in August.

With Americans looking for savings above all else, your site can tap into budget-conscious searches by inserting low-cost phrases like "best deal," "highly discounted," or "lowest price available." Apply this both to your paid search ads and to your search engine optimization efforts in the copy on your site, and the cost-conscious shopper will find you on the major search engines. Everyone is looking for a deal, so give it to them.

Recommendation: Take your top 15 keyword phrases and build a 30-day mini-campaign for your paid search program around low-cost descriptors. At the end of that 30-day period, evaluate what your CTR is compared with what it was without those low-cost phrases.

7. Email With Purpose

Stop the e-newsletter and start serving the customer. So many of us send our monthly e-newsletter with the fierce discipline of an Olympic athlete. We are dead set on getting that email out at 10 AM on the second Tuesday of every month, and will drop everything to make sure it gets out. But are our customers really waiting with baited breath for this generic e-newsletter to hit their inboxes? Are there going to be a flood of calls to customer service if at 10:01 AM the email has not arrived? Of course not. So why is it such a priority?

Instead of clinging to the e-newsletter habit, what about launching a timely, well-segmented email campaign that has relevant information that will be of the most interest to your customer base?

The day that an e-newsletter becomes the most important tool in your arsenal is the day you become a publisher. Stop spending your time on that low-impact e-newsletter and start spending it on relevancy and segmentation.

Recommendation: In your next e-newsletter, ask your customers what they are interested in, what they'd like to hear more about, and how often... then segment audiences and build campaigns around this information.

6. Analytics for Real

We all have Web analytic tools to measure what is happening on our Web site. And though many of us need to purchase a better software system for more relevant analysis, all of us need to improve what, how, and why we measure what we measure. Therefore, there is no better time than now to improve how we measure online success as it relates to company sales, cost savings, and ROI. And the great thing is that the hard costs are negligible: it's the soft cost of your time that is the real issue, making the analytics conversation a much easier one to have with the powers that be.

Retrench, re-evaluate and read best-practices to build a key performance indicator plan that will help you determine metrics of value to your business and eliminate those that are have little to no value.

Recommendation: Reflect on the major company and departmental goals for the year, then ask yourself, "How can I use my Web metrics to show how our site is improving those goals for the organization?"

5. Plunge Head-First Into Social Networking

Too many of us are still merely dipping our toes into the world of social networking. This time last year, about the same topic I wrote that there is no time for you to wait. This year, the need to jump in is even more pronounced.

Interest groups are being formed, new brand leaders are being established, and thought leaders are constantly emerging in these new social communities. If you are not out there making mistakes, learning the protocol, and getting a feel for how your brand and personal connection play in the bigger business cycle, you will quickly find yourself isolated and on the outside looking in.

How are you going to use Facebook, LinkedIn, and other essential social media to establish brand credibility and your place in that new marketplace?

Recommendation: Build a group in LinkedIn and Facebook and start the invitation process. And if you don't have profile set up in either, start there and begin to get a feel for the what it's like to be a participant in the community.

4. Stop Twittering, Start Working

Twitter has some very useful applications, but 90% of the information on the site has little to no importance to any of us. Unless you have a plan to monetize, stop wasting your time and start doing something productive. Just because you have 2,000 followers, does not mean anyone really cares what you are doing at 7AM Saturday morning!

Recommendation: Stop for 30 days and see if the sky comes crashing down.

3. Budget for Customers

One of the most compelling opportunities during times of economic uncertainty is to question all costs, practices, and budgeting processes. Now more than ever is a great time to get your peers to take a hard look at where your customers are spending their time and money, and then working to align your budgets accordingly. Are they reading the newspaper, are they reading magazines, are they listening to the radio?

Figure it out, and start spending where they are. Chances are, many more of your customers than you realize are online. Do you have the presence necessary to meet them there?

Recommendation: Do some quick research on Forrester, Pew Internet Research Project, or any of the other major research companies that study human behavior on this topic, then take that research to your next budget meeting and ask how this should affect your spend for 2009.

2. Education Is Always the Key

Ask anyone who has spent their life fighting the major epidemics of the world—AIDS, poverty, etc.—and they'll tell you that the key to solving the problem is education. Education on safe sex, education on malnutrition... education is always the first and most important step.

Today, with the enormous shift toward online communication, education of your stakeholders, coworkers, and superiors about the online space is essential to enabling solutions for years to come.

Going to their office and asking for additional resources (again!) for this year's online efforts won't do the trick. Educate yourself to educate them, and it will be smooth sailing for years to come.

Recommendation: Sign up yourself or a key stakeholder for a good webinar, conference, or certification program, or buy a great book on online media, and really get serious about starting the education process.

1. No Fear

Now is not the time to cower in your shell and hope this whole recession thing passes. If you fear the economic change that is upon us, the consequence will be poor results, bad decisions, and, for many, job loss.

On the other hand, if you embrace change, build a plan to capitalize on it, and approach your team with the attitude of becoming stronger as a result, you will find that the bumpy ride ahead can be more enjoyable with the positive focus and aggressive approach to tackling the challenge.

Recommendation: Build a plan that proactively tackles the issues versus reactively "kicks the can" of despair. So, what does "No Fear" actually translate into?

• It's a matter of attitude: "We have an opportunity to kick our competition's butt because we are going to do XYZ to gain market share while they scramble."
• It's functional: "We need to start doing more with less, which means making the existing programs that we keep better, and getting rid of those that we cannot measure."
• It's proactive and goal-driven: "If we can cut marketing cost 20% and increase lead generation 10%, then we'll open up more budget and the marketing team will be bonused."
  

Measuring Social Marketing and Media

Hardly a week goes by when you don't read or hear about social marketing or social media. Those terms are frequently used, so it's probably a good idea to first define them.

Social marketing was "born" as a discipline in the 1970s. Philip Kotler & Gerald Zaltman of Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, in 1971 used the term to describe the application of commercial marketing principles to health, social, and quality-of-life issues.

Social marketing was defined as "seeking to influence social behaviors not to benefit the marketer, but to benefit the target audience and the general society." It leverages the value that consumers/customers have in sharing between themselves and with the brand/manufacturer. It delivers a two-way communication link between the consumer/customer and the brand.

While social marketing was originally developed from the desire that companies had to capitalize on commercial marketing techniques, it has evolved into a more integrative and comprehensive discipline that draws on a wide array of technology, from the traditional media to new media, referred to as "social media."

These social media comprise primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information, such as viral videos, blogs, and online reviews, to help the company build its business.

Whereas your Web site provides customers and visitors with information about your company and its products—and you use the Internet to enhance your reach through things such as pay-per-click, webinars, and search—social media is about leveraging relationships and networks. It complements other online and offline marketing initiatives.

As more and more companies invest resources into social media and marketing, it's natural to ask the value of this investment is to be measured. Social media and marketing doesn't replace other media, just as radio didn't replace newspaper and television didn't replace radio. Rather, social media are another part of your multichannel-marketing efforts.

The same principles that you apply to determine how much you are going to invest in other media apply to online social media. The first principle is to select your target market. Second, develop consistent relevant messaging and content. Just as with any online effort, content is king when it comes to social media.

Today's challenge with social media and marketing is the same challenge affecting all forms of media: People's attention spans are short and they are easily and quickly distracted. Therefore, just like any other effort, a single strike may not be enough. When you decide to leverage social media you need to deploy it consistently over time.

As with any initiative, you can measure the impact of a social media effort only after you've determined the business outcome it supports and established performance-based objectives. For example, possible objectives could include increasing customer trial, improving brand advocacy/customer loyalty, or increasing share of preference. Each of these objectives should be tied to a business outcome. For example, increasing customer trial or share of preference may be tied to business outcomes around acquiring new customers or accelerating the rate of customer acquisition in order to impact revenue and market share.

The metrics you choose for your social media will be determined after you've established what business outcome needs to be achieved and how the social media supports your marketing objective. However, just as with any communication channel, you will want to have some way to create a measurement framework.

One possible approach is to measure your social media similar to how you measure public relations (PR) using outputs, outcomes, and business results as the basis of your framework. Why choose a framework similar to one used for PR? If you review the purpose of each—PR and social media—you can see that they are kissing cousins.

Public relations is about attempting to favorably influence the impressions and attitudes of a target audience primarily through endorsements (published articles, reports, reviews, etc.) by trusted, credible, objective third parties. Social media isn't very far afield from this idea when you consider that it is designed to have an impact on both engagement and influence through the participation and interaction of third-party networks and communities. They both rely on perceived trusted and credible third parties over which you have very little direct control.

How do you use the outputs, outcomes, and business results framework? First, let's define each category, because each category measures something different:

Outputs measure effectiveness and efficiency, such as... whether the campaign cost-effective, in terms of the number of positive reviews produced by community influencers, or the number of people engaged in a blog discussion on a topic related to your category that includes positive mentions of your company and its product.

Outcomes measure changes, preferably behavioral, resulting from the program/campaign/activity. For example, this could be the quantifiable change in the number of positive reviews for your company's recently launched new product.

Business results measure how the program, campaign, or activity helped the organization achieve a specific business objective. For example, the rate of adoption for your company's new product—that is, the incremental lift in sales for the product as a result of the social media.

The more quantitatively you can measure your social media, the better. The closer those measurements are to business outcomes, even better. How rapidly people in the network engage with you and respond to your "call to action," such as write a review, participate in the blog discussion, or forward something to a colleague.. can all be measured.

What you want to know is whether the social media efforts are having any incremental impact, and if so how much, so you can assess return on investment. Remember to keep the business outcome in mind, such as seeing an increase in the number of people "trialing" your product in order to increase the number of qualified leads in the pipeline and ultimately increase the number of "buyers."

So, even if the social media is producing a good return in terms of its specific metric, if it isn't moving the needle on the business outcome then more than likely you need to revisit your effort.

Neil Patel, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Do i need a website?

Q: My business is very small, just me and two employees, and our product really can't be sold online. Do I really need a website?

A: That's a good question. In fact, it's one of the most important and most frequently asked questions of the digital business age.
So should your business have a website, even if your business is small and sells products or services you don't think can be sold online? My answer in 1998 is the same as my answer today: Yes, if you have a business, you should have a website. Period. No question. Without a doubt.
Also, don't be so quick to dismiss your product as one that can't be sold online. Nowadays, there's very little that can't be sold over the internet. More than 20 million shoppers are now online, purchasing everything from books to computers to cars to real estate to jet airplanes to natural gas to you name it. If you can imagine it, someone will figure out how to sell it online.
Let me clarify one point: I'm not saying you should put all your efforts into selling your wares over the internet, though if your product lends itself to easy online sales, you should certainly be considering it. The point to be made here is that you should at the very least have a presence on the web so that customers, potential employees, business partners and perhaps even investors can quickly and easily find out more about your business and the products or services you have to offer.
That said, it's not enough that you just have a website. You must have a professional-looking site if you want to be taken seriously. Since many consumers now search for information online prior to making a purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, your site may be the first chance you have at making a good impression on a potential buyer. If your site looks like it was designed by a barrel of colorblind monkeys, your chance at making a good first impression will be lost.
One of the great things about the internet is that it has leveled the playing field when it comes to competing with the big boys. As mentioned, you have one shot at making a good first impression. With a well-designed site, your little operation can project the image and professionalism of a much larger company. The inverse is also true. I've seen many big company websites that were so badly designed and hard to navigate that they completely lacked professionalism and credibility. Good for you, too bad for them.
You may have a small operation, but when it comes to benefiting from a website, size does not matter. I don't care if you're a one-man show or a 10,000-employee corporate giant; if you don't have a website, you're losing business to other companies that do.
Here's the exception to my rule: It's actually better to have no website at all than to have one that makes your business look bad. Your site speaks volumes about your business. It either says, "Hey, look, we take our business so seriously that we have created this wonderful site for our customers!" or it screams, "Hey, look, I let my 10-year-old nephew design my site. Good luck finding anything!"
Your website is an important part of your business. Make sure you treat it as such.

Adopting a Web 2.0 Mindset: Walk Before You Wiki

Since Tim O'Reilly coined the phrase "Web 2.0" back in 2004 at a new media conference, companies have been scrambling to figure out how to deploy Web. 2.0 applications... but for all the wrong reasons.

I've observed CEOs pointing to competitors' sites, insisting, "They've got user-generated content so we need to do it," or, "A blog will help with our PR efforts during this downturn."

But where is the customer in the equation?

For all the buzz about blogs, wikis, widgets, and other forms of user-driven Web interactions, the question that's rarely asked is, "Is this what our customers want?"

Recently, when I helped a client pose that question to its Web site users, only 1 out of 10 users asked for social applications. The majority wanted the company to improve its site's core navigation and search functionality.

Essentially, they were asking my client to "walk before you wiki" by enhancing core functionality they use every time they visit the site.

Given the exposure of social applications in the media and in the boardroom, now's the time for Web business owners to make the case for building engaging online interactions with customers.

First, you need to recognize that customers will engage with site features they need and want. Simply put, you can design the most useful, elegant application, but if your customers don't need it—it will eventually languish on your site as another "distraction."

By listening to your customers, you'll understand what they value and need on your site and be able to prioritize new projects based on this information along with business and technical considerations.

Learn to Listen

How can you learn what customers and prospects need from your site? Based on your budget and target audience, there are several ways to effectively glean information. Ideally, you should use a mix of tools and information to get a holistic view of your users to understand what they want from your site, their preferences, behavior, and Web savviness.

Third-party research

To get started and obtain broad insights into your target audience's online needs, consider leveraging third-party research. Research conducted via a consumer panel should provide you with statistically significant data that, when coupled with primary research (see below), can help you make a business case.

If you have a well-defined and narrow target audience (e.g., male, married, age 35-54, high education and income levels, etc.), you can leverage third-party research from firms like Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) that survey consumers and report out on specific online activities they engage in, like banking, shopping, participation on social sites, etc.

Primary research

If your user base straddles age brackets, income levels, geographies, etc., or your online offering doesn't fit neatly into a typical retail or services category, then you should conduct your own research. There are some very effective—and inexpensive—methods you can use depending on your objectives:

* Web analytics: Tap into your analytics data to understand how your site's visitors behave. Are they exiting certain pages at a high rate? Do they tend to search for the same products while ignoring or missing others? Analytics will surface those trends but won't reveal user intent. So while you might not be able to pinpoint what is causing visitors to leave certain pages at a high rate, or search for certain products, you can tee up those issues as scenarios to test in a usability setting.

* Surveys: There are a variety of inexpensive survey tools, including Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com), Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com), and Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) that you can use to quickly build and launch customer surveys either on-site or via email. Surveys generate quantitative data about why users visit your site and how they perceived their experience, but, again, they won't reveal user intent.

* Usability testing: Once you've identified a list of user needs and potential issues—based on your analytics and survey data—you can run any problem scenarios through a usability test. Are users telling you they primarily come to your site to find product information but give your site a low rating on its search and browse functionality? Run these kinds of scenarios through usability testing to uncover specific problem areas that you can then work to fix.

Walk Before You Wiki

Before you launch a blog, or enable user-generated content on your site, make sure you can answer the basic question, "Do I know what my visitors need and am I delivering it to them?"