SMB Marketing Blog

Marketers are shifting to digital for a variety of reasons, chief among them are the results.  While social media gets all the hype, it’s two tried and true workhorses, email and search marketing, that come out on top of effectiveness.  From a post over at Marketing Profs:

Most marketing executives cite email or search marketing as their company’s top-performing advertising channel in 2009—39.4% and 23.6%, respectively—and over nine in ten (93.6%) say they plan to increase their budget allocation to digital marketing in the next five years, according to the Fourth Annual Marketing and Media Survey from Datran Media.

Just 9.4% of marketers cited offline channels as their most effective response channel last year. Another 4.7% cited social media, while mobile marketing, still in its early stages, was cited by 0.8% of marketers.

Crucially I’d argue that all these pieces need to work together.  Search so they find you, content to convert them, email to nurture them.

The folks at Forrester Research have updated their Interactive Marketing Forecast out to 2014. 

The table of contents has some predictable headlines:

• Interactive Will Cannibalize Traditional Media
• Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $55 Billion By 2014
• Search Marketing Still Leads Interactive Spend
• Display Advertising Rebounds
• Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
• Social Media Fixes Itself In The Interactive Mix
• Mobile Marketing Matters – Post Recession
• WHAT IT MEANS – Interactive Trends Will Redefine Your Business

It’s a very good read, and a few points jumped out for me.

When faced with budget cuts or the need for immediate sales, these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience that goes way beyond a 30-second television spot or two-dimensional print ad. Forty-two percent of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.

And last, even laggard industries feel that they have enough experience and data to prove interactive marketing’s worth. Online display spending by telecom companies in Q1 2009 grew 50% over Q1 2008.

What was also interesting was the the potential for more growth; interactive marketing ad spend is still under represented and laggard compared to how much of sample media time is spend online.

You can sign up for a copy of the full report here, courtesy of  DemandGen Report. Check it out. Your marketing future may depend on it!

Google calendar

2009 is here and so is our new blog. We wanted to share what we see as best practices to help contribute to the B2B marketing community. Much has changed (for the better I might add) as online marketing and  advertising, email and search engine marketing has made selling to their customers more effective and efficient. Businesses everywhere can now reach their market instantly, globally and with a fraction of the millions it used to take.

Of course, our ActiveConversion SaaS product has helped lead this charge, especially for SMBs, tech companies and B2B services companies. But it’s a combination of tools, content and tactics such as online marketing that make this strategy work. And that’s why we started this blog – to give you quick tips and techniques to make your B2B marketing REALLY work.

If you haven’t already, to understand what we mean for this first post, read a synopsis of  Seth Godin’s ‘Meatball Sundae’. Essentially, Seth’s thesis is that you can’t just mix something you want (like ice cream), to something you still like (like meatballs), and expect a good result. The book postulates that new marketing (like social marketing) won’t work well when just added haphazardly to existing marketing. As a result, it then gets dropped, with the familiar ‘we tried it, and it didn’t work for us’ excuse.

A simple example we’ve seen are websites. Most websites are still being built by companies used to creating brochures. So what you get is an electronic brochure  that (usually) look great, but aren’t measured, have no calls to action, aren’t search engine optimized and generally fail. We’ve even seen websites without a single form on the site – which make sense in a Meatball Sundae – brochures don’t have forms!

In any case, we hope to help usher in a new generation of B2B marketing, that will make your business or company more successful in the year(s) to come. We hope you’ll follow it and profit!

Happy New Year!