Top 5 Online Marketing Predictions for 2009

Business Model is King

What goes around comes around! With 2008’s collapse of the web 2.0 economy, business models based on monthly earnings, not potential, will be king. For the last few years companies continued to build business models based on being bought out by the bigger fish. Getting venture capital was once as easy as getting a subprime mortgage, and those days are over. Having a gross profit margin in the black will be gold, and businesses will continue to layoff until lean and mean. Another unfortunate consequence will be a decline in new web 2.0 ideas and free services. What this means for marketing firms is to be successful don’t just jump on the first client willing to save them in selling their product. Listen to their business model and how you can find them a strategy that works. If the numbers don’t make sense then it might not make sense to have them as a client who eventually cancels. Better to take on a small client who can expand if their business model makes sense.

Web 3.0 Will Not Occur This Year

Everyone seems to keep wishing that web 3.0 will come save the day of the cliche of web 2.0. Unfortunately this will not occur and a huge slowdown of new web 2.0 concepts and services will occur. Valuations of current companies utilizing web 2.0 technologies are plummeting already and unfortunately getting lots of traffic does not mean a profitable business. Traffic can only go so far and in an economy based on the bottom line, venture capitalists are thinking twice about how beneficial that new web 2.0 widget is and the development costs associated with it. At best we will probably see a year of web 2.0 recycling and refinement of design and user experience.

Keyword Prices Will Go Up

Keyword bid-prices seem to go up every year anyways, but those looking for a break this year will be disappointed. As print and high-cost brand advertising will shift to spend more in trackable ROI’s such as PPC and SEO, this shift will increasingly drive up the cost of competitive keywords. Even if some companies cut their monthly spend, the need for quality leads will push keyword prices higher as companies will become even more competitive. Though google will probably see a decrease in overall spend from campaigns due to companies shifting to email publishers and affiliate networks, they will surely make up for the costs ahead of the long tail getting inflated. Top 10 rankings in Google and a viable SEO strategy based on ROI should also become increasingly competitive.

Quality of Design and User Experience Will Improve Dramatically

As Web 2.0 cools off this will leave a glut of designers and developers willing to cut costs in order to make an extra buck. Businesses and startups with a need for a redesign of their website should be able to gain a competitive price from expert designers who normally would have charged and arm and a leg. Expect user experience and landing page design to be big as well in order to improve conversions from PPC campaigns and general site traffic.

Viral Marketing Campaigns Will Die

As companies continue to slash all non-converting marketing, budgets for viral campaigns will also seem too risky for the price. No longer will experiments in traffic generation get approved by the marketing manager now faced with a shrunken budget. Lookout for free social media sites, and content that is actually worth being viral, to be a hit this year. In other words, if you don’t have anything interesting to say good luck!

By park blvd marketing

9 Marketing Trends for 2009

While the economy in 2009 looks challenging for most companies, the outlook of marketing executives is rather bright and upbeat.

Deborah Kania and her team at Brightworks Interactive have just released results of their survey of marketing executives' plans for 2009. The survey covered both B-to-B and B-to-C companies, as well as a mix of large, medium, and small businesses, so the survey results represent a good cross-section of marketers.

Here are nine marketing trends you can expect during 2009:

Marketing Trend #1: Increased use of digital media and a decrease in television, radio, and print media.

Marketing Trend #2: Increased use of quality, targeted content (textual and video) that tells a company's story well and engages the prospective customer.

Marketing Trend #3: Increased use of e-mail to reach out to prospects and customers more frequently at a very low cost.

Marketing Trend #4: Increased use of blogs, social networking, and other social media to create dialog and relationships with prospects and customers.

Marketing Trend #5: Increased use of analytics tools (e.g., Google Analytics) to spot ways to improve ROI.

Marketing Trend #6: Increased focus on organic (i.e., free) search engine optimization (SEO) content targeting.

Marketing Trend #7: Increased use of search engine marketing (SEM) techniques, such as pay-per-click and other trackable paid marketing techniques.

Marketing Trend #8: Increased use of online webinars and decreased use of large trade shows.

Marketing Trend #9: Increased use of outsourced marketing functions to experienced professionals.

These marketing executives plan to increase or maintain budgets and their staffs, which past recessions have shown is how companies pull out of a recession quickly.

The report also offers some practical marketing resolutions for 2009 that all marketing executives can incorporate into their marketing plan for 2009.

You can get a complete copy of their marketing survey "Marketing 2009 and Marketing 

Resolutions To Keep In the New Year" at their Web site: 

www.brightworksinteractive.com/marketing-survey.html.

by Cliff Allen Consulting

Web 2.0 and Marketing

For marketers, Web 2.0 offers a remarkable new opportunity to engage consumers.
If only they knew how to do it.

That's where this article aims to help. We interviewed more than 30 executives and managers in both large and small organizations that are at the forefront of experimenting with Web 2.0 tools. From those conversations and further research, we identified a set of emerging principles for marketing.

But first, a more basic question: What is Web 2.0, anyway? Essentially, it encompasses the set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online. That includes blogs, wikis, social-networking sites and other online communities, and virtual worlds.

Millions of people have become familiar with these tools through sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Second Life, or by writing their own blogs. And a growing number of marketers are using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with consumers on product development, service enhancement and promotion. But most companies still don't appear to be well versed in this area.

So here's a look at the principles we arrived at -- and how marketers can use them to get the best results.

Don't just talk at consumers -- work with them throughout the marketing process.
Web 2.0 tools can be used to do what traditional advertising does: persuade consumers to buy a company's products or services. An executive can write a blog, for instance, that regularly talks up the company's goods. But that kind of approach misses the point of 2.0. Instead, companies should use these tools to get the consumers involved, inviting them to participate in marketing-related activities from product development to feedback to customer service.

How can you do that? A leading greeting-card and gift company that we spoke with is one of many that have set up an online community -- a site where it can talk to consumers and the consumers can talk to each other. The company solicits opinions on various aspects of greeting-card design and on ideas for gifts and their pricing. It also asks the consumers to talk about their lifestyles and even upload photos of themselves, so that it can better understand its market.
A marketing manager at the company says that, as a way to obtain consumer feedback and ideas for product development, the online community is much faster and cheaper than the traditional focus groups and surveys used in the past. The conversations consumers have with each other, he adds, result in "some of the most interesting insights," including gift ideas for specific occasions, such as a college graduation, and the prices consumers are willing to pay for different gifts.

Similarly, a large technology company uses several Web 2.0 tools to improve collaboration with both its business partners and consumers. Among other things, company employees have created wikis -- Web sites that allow users to add, delete and edit content -- to list answers to frequently asked questions about each product, and consumers have added significant contributions. For instance, within days of the release of a new piece of software by the company, consumers spotted a problem with it and posted a way for users to deal with it. They later proposed a way to fix the problem, which the company adopted. Having those solutions available so quickly showed customers that the company was on top of problems with its products.

Give consumers a reason to participate.

Consumers have to have some incentive to share their thoughts, opinions and experiences on a company Web site.

One lure is to make sure consumers can use the online community to network among themselves on topics of their own choosing. That way the site isn't all about the company, it's also about them. For instance, a toy company that created a community of hundreds of mothers to solicit their opinions and ideas on toys also enables them to write their own blogs on the site, a feature that many use to discuss family issues.

Other companies provide more-direct incentives: cash rewards or products, some of which are available only to members of the online community. Still others offer consumers peer recognition by awarding points each time they post comments, answer questions or contribute to a wiki entry. Such recognition not only encourages participation, but also has the benefit of allowing both the company and the other members of the community to identify experts on various topics.

Many companies told us that a moderator plays a critical role in keeping conversations going, highlighting information that's important to a discussion and maintaining order. That's important because consumers are likely to drift away if conversations peter out or if they feel that their voices are lost in a chaotic flood of comments. The moderator can also see to it that consumer input is seen and responded to by the right people within the company.

And, of course, it's important to make a site as easy to use as possible. For instance, there should be clear, simple instructions for consumers to set up a blog or contribute to a wiki.
Listen to -- and join -- the conversation outside your site.

Consumers tend to trust one another's opinions more than a company's marketing pitch. And there is no shortage of opinions online.

The managers we interviewed accept that this type of content is here to stay and are aware of its potential impact -- positive or negative -- on consumers' buying decisions. So they monitor relevant online conversations among consumers and, when appropriate, look for opportunities to inject themselves into a conversation or initiate a potential collaboration.

For example, a marketing manager of a leading consumer-electronics company monitors blogs immediately after a new-product launch in order to understand "how customers are actually reacting to the product." Other managers keep an eye on sites like Digg.com and Del.icio.us that track the most popular topics on the Web, to see if there's any buzz around their new products, and whether they should be adjusting, say, features or prices.

In one case, a company found a popular blogger who had spoken highly of the company's brand. Just prior to launching a new product, the company sent the blogger a free sample, inviting him to review it with no strings attached. The end result: The blogger wrote a favorable review and generated a flood of comments. So the company got nearly free publicity and feedback.

Peter & Maria Hoey
Resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell.

Many marketers have been trained to bludgeon consumers with advertising -- to sell, sell, sell anytime and anywhere consumers can be found. In an online community, it pays to resist that temptation.

When consumers are invited to participate in online communities, they expect marketers to listen and to consider their ideas. They don't want to feel like they're simply a captive audience for advertising, and if they do they're likely to abandon the community.

The head of consumer research for a leading consumer-electronics organization created an online community of nearly 50,000 consumers to discuss product-development and marketing issues.

One of the key principles of the community, she says, was "not to do anything about marketing, because we weren't about selling; we were about conversing."

In short order, community members not only identified what it was they were looking for in the company's products, but also suggested innovations to satisfy those needs. The company quickly developed prototypes based on those suggestions, and got an enthusiastic response: Community members asked when they would be able to buy the products and if they would get the first opportunity to buy them. They didn't have to be sold on anything.

Don't control, let it go.

In an online community, every company needs to find an effective balance between trying to steer the conversation about its products and allowing the conversation to flow freely. In general, though, the managers we interviewed believe that companies are better off giving consumers the opportunity to say whatever is on their minds, positive or negative. Moderators can keep things running smoothly and coherently, but they shouldn't always keep the conversation on a predetermined track. The more that consumers talk freely, the more a company can learn about how it can improve its products and its marketing.

One marketing executive recalled the first time she let an online community created for a client interact with very little control or moderation, resulting in an animated discussion about the look of the company's product. The client, with great concern, asked. "Who told them [the consumers] they could do this, that they could go this far?" Of course, when this process resulted in totally new packaging that helped boost sales, the client was ecstatic.

As another executive of a company that creates online communities for clients told us: "You have to let the members drive. When community members feel controlled, told how to respond and how to act, the community shuts down."

Find a 'marketing technopologist.'

So who should direct a company's forays into Web 2.0 marketing? A number of managers identified an ideal set of skills for an executive that go beyond those of a typical M.B.A. holder or tech expert. We coined the term marketing technopologist for a person who brings together strengths in marketing, technology and social interaction. A manager said, "I'd want to see someone with the usual M.B.A. consultant's background, strong interest in psychology and sociology, and good social-networking skills throughout the organization."

Foot soldiers need to be carefully selected as well. One large technology company weighs employees' proven skills to choose writers for blogs that are read by consumers. The company has long used blogs internally to help employees discuss technical issues, products, and company and industry topics. When it decided to use blogs to raise its profile online, it recruited those who had shown the most skill at blogging within the company. The company currently has about 15 employees who blog publicly, mostly on technology trends, and is recruiting more the same way. Meanwhile, the bloggers plan to meet occasionally to share the lessons learned from their experiences.

Embrace experimentation.

One Web 2.0 strategy does not fit all, and sometimes the best way to find out what's best for a given company is to try some things out and see what happens.

Blogs, wikis and online communities are among the tools that companies are most commonly using for marketing, but there are other ways to reach consumers. Some of the companies we talked with have gotten their feet wet in the online virtual world Second Life, where millions of users interact with each other through avatars. Companies can sell their goods and services and sponsor events in Second Life just as they do in the real world; one sponsored a contest for the best avatar.

Others are considering new ways to use more-familiar tools. For instance, many companies have long used instant messaging on their Web sites to allow shoppers to chat with customer-service representatives. One executive we spoke with said he would like to experiment with allowing consumers to chat with each other as they shop on his company's site.

By Dr. Parise is an assistant professor of technology, operations and information management at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. Dr. Guinan is an associate professor of technology, operations and information management at Babson College. Dr. Weinberg is chairman of the marketing department and an associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.

What In The World Is Web 2.0 Marketing?

Marketing is a large part of your business, and successful marketing is a large part of having a successful business. Many people are very easily confused when they see web 2.0 marketing somewhere. However, there is nothing to be confused about. It’s not a special program or different type of marketing. It’s just a new way of doing things, and the whole “2.0″ is just a buzzword that was mentioned once by someone and stuck. Basically, web 2.0 marketing is simply viral marketing. And viral marketing is simply word-of-mouth. It’s a newer form of advertising and marketing that reaches more people and appeals to consumers in a manner they can relate to.

Viral marketing allows you to connect with potential customers on a much more personal level; through social networks, blogs, and other personal forums, you can create relationships that you might not have been able to otherwise. In order to make the most of web 2.0 marketing, you need to keep a few things in mind.

First, you need to attach emotion to your social marketing. Regardless of whether you make people love you or hate you, or make them feel happy or sad, an emotion needs to come out of the personal opinion that you give. Also, you need to be different. People are tired of the same old song and dance. If you’re going to use a new marketing method, you need a new story to tell. Do something completely unexpected; you’ll attract much more attention through shock and unexpectedness.

With viral marketing, you HAVE to convey a personal story or message. You can’t just advertise and expect things to work out. You need to give people a story that they can relate to and attach themselves to, so they can see the purpose for buying your products and/or services. Keeping an open door policy is another big part of web 2.0 marketing. People need to feel welcome and be able to access information easily.

Even having a sign in website can drive away business, so keep everything public and free to get the best response from your marketing endeavors.

Accepting comments and using comments to communicate with your readers on blogs and message boards is another way to personalize your business. By giving your business a virtual face, you will make it really hard for people to turn away from your business.

Next time you see the word “web 2.0″, don’t be afraid. Instead, just know that it’s nothing more than a fancy buzzword.

Source

10 Myths About New Home Sales Marketing

Missing the Mark?

If you are in new home sales and marketing it may feel like the world is changing. No one reads the newspaper anymore, big agencies promoting big media buys are going under, and the buying public at large seems to have turned a deaf ear to every promotion, every marketing message, and every initiative. Thousands of dollars are being poured in and a few drops of interest are coming out. Despite market hardships we’ve been through cycles before, but this… this feels new. Is the world changing?

It already has. The evolution of offline to online is not a work in progress anymore.

There are several tried and true rules of builder marketing that continue to pervade of landscape of every newspaper, every sales office, and every new home community website. But the world has moved on and left us behind. Here are the top ten myths homebuilder marketing still holds onto, and how to let go:

Myth # 1: Print an expensive, shiny brochure to hand out to every prospect. Aside from being an environmental nightmare, brochures are expensive ($5 - $10) each and are often created long before the doors of a sales office open. This means we are shooting blind with a message that we hope resonates with buyers. Brochures are also inflexible, creating a stagnate “tool” that does not give marketers a chance to respond to market trends.

Myth # 2: We control the message. We do not control the message. In increasing numbers, brands are being thrown to the online masses to devour and dissect in blogs, user ratings, and other peer generated content that prospects are relying on more and more in their decision making. Blogs like Socketsite and others are taking our cleverly crafted marketing messages and creating their own. Case in point: http://tinyurl.com/635cve.

Myth # 3: Flash! Nothing sells home online like Flash! Actually, nothing sells home online like buyers being able to find you when they type in “Atlanta Condos” or “San Jose real estate.” Flash makes sites harder to find for search engines and also offers no relationship building tool to keep them on your site. Lack of any substance beyond pretty flash animation leaves buyers bored and un-engaged, increasing your bounce rate, decreasing your opt-in, and reducing your ROI.

Myth # 4: No one buys homes on the internet. A high ranking marketing person recently said this to me and I will concede that she is right, no one writes earnest money deposits or signs contracts online (yet). However, it is estimated that at least 70% of potential home buyers start their search online and rule out potential new homes based on the online marketing presence. That means that many buyers are not even giving us the opportunity to sell them a home during a sales office visit. Many stages of the qualifying (price, location) and trial close process are now completed online, meaning that buyers are further down the sales process when they arrive at our sales office. Although buyers do not purchase online, they do buy in (or out) of our message.

Myth # 5: The only metrics that count are sales office traffic, sales, and closings. These metrics (traffic to include be-backs) are the traditional measure of the success of any given week for homebuilder marketing. The challenge with this logic is that it does not give us the information that enables us to replicate success. As new home sales marketing professionals, we need to to expand our ideas of conversion and metrics. Today’s buyer takes weeks, months, even more than a year to make a buying decision. We need to provide hard data about what buyers are responding to at each stage of their decision making process, not just sales visit and sale.

Myth # 6: Lifestyle photos and pithy tag lines sell homes. Last year a large homebuilder had a billboard on a major Bay Area freeway ($$$$) with a lifestyle photo of a young couple and the tagline “Life happens. Go with it.”

Enough said.

Myth # 7: More new traffic! More new leads! This will sell more homes. Traditional new home marketing focused heavily (and in some cases still does) on spending large media budgets on driving more, more, more new leads into the sales office. This made sense in the old days because buyers bought on the first visit, but it’s simply no longer true. We need to shift our marketing dollars to bringing existing prospects back into the sales office. Again. And again. And again. In a previous post I wrote about a builder who easily spent $45,000 for a direct mail campaign to a purchased list but balked at $500 for an email to their existing database. We need to focus on building relationships and trust with people in the middle of the sales funnel (warm leads) and a measured, disciplined approach to driving new leads into the top of the funnel (cold leads). The people most likely to buy this month (or this quarter) are already in your database.

Myth # 8: One Size Fits All. One of the cruelest of retail myths is equally cruel to new home marketing. Our newspaper ads, our eBlasts, our direct mail, our brochure - all targeted to a single message aimed at the broadest possible audience. Yet, within each community are several buyer profiles, each with their own emotional triggers. For example, a three bedroom/2 bath single story home might work equally well for young families and retirees, but these buying motives are very different. In trying to appeal to everyone, we connect with no one.

Myth # 9: I have an online marketing strategy. I have a web site and I use Postlets. Postlets is a great tool for getting your homes posted to several sites on the web where they can reach a larger audience, but it is only a tool. It is not a strategy. Your builder website, your new home email marketing campaign, your MLS listings. These are are tools, but without a comprehensive strategy with measurable goals and objectives it’s impossible to determine how effective your online efforts really are. Remembering that ROI refers not just to financial investment but also an investment of time, brand, reputation, and talent, an online strategy is crucial as a roadmap to reaching buyers online.

Myth # 10: Traditional new homes marketing is dead. Traditional marketing is not dead. New media offers us the tools to increase our effectiveness in traditional media, reduce wasted dollars on unproven messages, capture prospective buyers earlier in the decision making process (and ahead of our competition), minimize the market research cost and timeframe, target messages, segment and track marketing initiatives, and better understand our buyers. An integrated approach of new media + traditional media will lower overall marketing costs and eliminate the guesswork of developing messages that sell homes.

By Idea One Media

Marketing After the Web 2 0 Tsunami

Web 2.0 arrived and immediately redefined the way marketers function on the net. Marketing after the Tsunami better known as Web 2.0 now takes a lot more interaction. Marketers in the past were satisfied to co-exist in anonymity because it gave them the power to promote their products without exposing themselves. Web 2.0 has changed internet marketer's approach to delivering their products to the masses. It has definitely open the doors to some new marketing strategies, some good and some definitely bad. The question we need to answer is; Has Web 2.0's takeover of the marketing arena improved the business as a whole or opened internet marketing to the less skillful.

Internet marketing was base on a simple of foundation of generating traffic to your website using a well optimized website. The more people you could reach by using SEO methods or PPC, the more your business stood a chance to succeed. The use of certain eye catching headlines and visuals were also effective, but you had to get your audience to your site first before you could use those marketing methods. Once you got someone to your site you then had to make sure that your site had great content in order to create a repeat visitor. The foundation of the internet has not changed, You still need all those components to capture your visitors, but the approach has changed.

Web 2.0 has transform internet marketing by creating a social environment that gives marketers more visibility with their potential prospects. Social marketing has become the core of the web 2.0 movement. Powerhouse websites like My Space, Facebook, and You Tube has forced even the old school marketer to break down. Nowadays if you don't have one of the powerhouse websites in your marketing portfolio, chances are you are leaving money on the table. Making business or personal contacts using these site is a viral marketing tool that is unparallel to any other strategy. The only problem I have found with the Web 2.0 phenomenon is that your information is accessible to any and everyone. The negative aspects of having your information disclose, is the unsolicited intrusion from spammers who send fraudulent or sexually based ads. If you don't mind being flashed or spam occasionally then Web 2.0 is definitely a positive.

In conclusion I believe that Marketing After the Web 2.0 Tsunami has expanded the internet in a good way. Putting a face to your product or business is a win-win situation, the customer can feel more secure and at the same time you can brand yourself as a good marketer. For those of you who do not wish to get involved in Web 2.0 strategies, the internet marketing foundation is still in tact. Marketing techniques such as SEO, PPC, and email marketing are still the most effective internet marketing tools. If you are an old school marketer you should take add the new tactics to your current marketing to generate a marketing Tsunami of your own. The addition of social marketing strategies will not hurt the business but rather expand it to an even larger market.

By Marc Marseille

Companies Are Not Ready, Willing And Able For Marketing 2.0

Most companies looking at Social Media and Web 2.0 see it as a media channel to broadcast their messages into. This includes most Governments and Associations. This is the wrong reason to do it and the wrong strategy.

If your company is looking at engaging in the social channels, but simply wants to tell the gathered audience about their brands, messages, products and services, here's the one best piece of advice to make that happen: advertise on those channels.

You can do either mass advertising or you can target ads specifically to the types of people who might be more inclined to act on your messages. Companies like Facebook and Google offer these types of targeting. The common attitude is, "let's post our videos on YouTube," or "everyone's on Twitter, we should be on Twitter too," and what comes after is a closed, one-way broadcasting channel that does not engender the shared values of these social systems, including: commenting, being open to differing opinions, responding and - most importantly - making changes based on the feedback and conversation that is taking place.

This is the primary reason why most companies have epic fails on these channels: they're broadcasting not engaging, responding and adapting.

Don't ask for people's opinions or be in channels where that back and forth takes place and not do anything about it. It's insulting and it's a huge waste of both your time and the people who have connected to you.

A lot of companies talk about "opening up" or "letting the information free" but what it boils down to is a couple of inches more liberal than their traditional marketing and communications. Have you seen some of the topics of conversation listed at recent Government, Association, Marketing and Public Relations seminars? They hint at how open the topic will be, but the subtle undertones of the conference description and the speakers asked to present stink of, "how can your company understand what people are saying and how your company can control the chaos and broadcast into it."

It's the wrong way to be looking at things.

Here are the bigger questions your organization needs to be asking before entering these channels:

- Are we willing to not just listen, but to respond and adapt based on the back and forth?
- Are we willing to become active participants - not just in our channels but in the other channels and spaces as well?
- Are we willing to change the focus from being on our company to being about everybody - us, them and the entire community?
- Are we willing to be participants with just as much fervour and passion when it's not good for us, but good for the community or the industry as a whole?
- Are we willing to be open?
- Are we willing to be really, really open and transparent?

Individuals have an obvious and very real reason to be skeptical of brands and companies in the social media sphere. The majority of companies have done a very poor job of changing that perspective because - for the most part - they are simply using these tools to broadcast their messages in a uni-directional fashion.

Most companies see these channels as another mass media tool (after all, they are going where the masses are), this forces them to look at the wrong metrics (still), like how many people are seeing their message and what are they doing? Versus, who is seeing their messages, what are they feedbacking and how quickly can the company change their business to adapt and grow?

By Mitch Joel