The traditional website is becoming de-centralized, as most traditional websites are fragmenting into hundreds of micro-footprints through blogs, social networks, newsgroups and multiple wholly owned properties. 

At the same time, the market at large is calling for online marketing management software to become centralized (see Forrester), so that more cohesive campaigns can be built, and disparate datasets can be merged together for better visibility.

 To quote a great Ottawa personality: Isn’t it ironic.

 I think the answer to this ironic situation is in another quote (and source of online flame wars) – “Web analytics is hard”.

 While it is definitely a legitimate hot-button and market requirement, a centralized online marketing suite is not a silver bullet.  There is no doubt that it is impossible to make decisions about current successes and future plans if you have fifteen sets of reports from fifteen disparate tools. 

 We deal with this on a day to day basis at Sitebrand.  If a customer uses us to personalize messages to a visitor from a particular affiliate with the goal of growing conversions, they now have three reports from three vendors, none of which connect, and all of which have different numbers.  Yikes.

 Given the aggressive adoption (and evangelization) of 2.0 technologies and marketing methods however, no online marketing suite will ever be able to solve problems out of the box.

 In five years from now, it might be effective to push a viral video out through RSS specifically to mobile browsers, with the hope that they click through the video to a Facebook widget created to have friends push coupons to your products to each other, which can be used online or in store.

 And I can promise you, even in five years there won’t be enough Red Bulls and developers in the world to build transparent reporting around that initiative.

 All that is going to happen is that the leading thinkers in the space are going to say “Online Marketing Suites are hard”.  And they will be right.

 Build a plan, work the plan, show the plan worked.  We are still struggling with it as we come to the end of Commerce 1.0, and we will keep struggling with it until we standardize on ‘what should be done’.

 Perhaps this is a job  for the WAA standards committee.  They are doing a great job in standardizing the common terms in analytics so that the industry stays on the same page.

An interesting next step for them might include a practical document standardizing what a team of web practitioners should be doing for procedures, tools usage, documentation etc.  Better yet, including a scoring system so that readers could self-evaluate. Think Gartner maturity model, but for eCommerce. 

 The moral of the story is that there is no piece of software, in present or future,  that will help execute on a plan when no plan has been built.  I think if more web teams knew where they ranked based on holistic best practices, they could take some of the ‘hard’ out of web 1.0, and be prepared to reap more value than hype from the next generation of technologies and practices.

 Cheers,

 Jim

We’ve talked about the power of integrated marketing campaigns because the combined message creates a sense of credibility and trust among the buying public. After all, if you do not trust the merchant then you will certainly not buy from them. Customer loyalty is another method of measuring and assessing how much trust your customers place in you. However, many Marketers drop the ball on creating this sense of trust. It’s easily done with some integrated marketing tactics.

Consider the use of customer testimonials. Clients leave them all of the time. At worse, you simply need to ask for them. It’s amazing how much people like to share and to talk. An integrated campaign will take that quote and create a case study. The case study then gets pitched to a major and trusted publication usually tied in to some human interest angle. That leads to a press release announcing the happy customer, or event, and referencing the case study and the industry coverage. Accordingly, you inform your opt-in email list of the great news and perhaps associate a short-term promotion tied to the event. Your email service provider utilizes the Forward-to-a-Friend feature to allow your email subscribers to share the news, and the positive branding, with their friends. Now suddenly your relevance in the search engines increases proportionately to the multiple references. Your higher rankings, and your supporting mentions, combine to nurture the consumer with a positive experience of your brand. Said another way – your integrated marketing leveraged one piece across multiple marketing channels. That’s what I’m talking about!

So where is the Word of Mouth we alluded to? Simple. It’s the by-product of your campaigns. People like to talk. Why do we want them to talk? Because online sales tools only nominally augment the likelihood to convert according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The study goes on to say that 64% found out about the product from friends, family, or co-workers.

So how do you encourage word of mouth because we know that will increase actual online conversions? Simple – you create a personalized, one-on-one experience for each consumer or visitor and then you complement the experience with integrated marketing. Combined, you create credibility and trust — and buzz!

So! How goes the integrated marketing?

It’s not everyday Ottawa marketers have the opportunity to see and hear a MarketingSherpa thought leader and influencer in person. But thanks to OCRI (Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation) and its popular Zone5ive series, that’s about to change.

At tomorrow’s event which is still open for registrations, the guest speaker is Stefan Tornquist, Research Director at MarketingSherpa, and you can bet there will be plenty to learn. With a focus on B2B marketing, he’s promised to share 7 proven tactics for success in 2008. The usual suspects like email and search are a given – but business technology marketing is also listed as a point of discussion and this is open to lots of direction.

Of course, Sherpa does publish a “Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide” and from what I can see it offers “practical data on: search, email, PR, direct mail, lead generation, trade shows, podcasting, telemarketing and budgeting.”

Since B2B marketing is very web-centric, I’m really hoping there will be some mention of persuasion tactics like web personalization because this is the technology that is truly capable of heavily influencing online engagement and conversion. BTW Conversion for a B2B marketer might not mean an immediate “close” especially depending on the value of typical B2B deals. Meaningful conversion on a B2B site might be more of a relationship/credibility builder – maybe a whitepaper download or a demo request or a newsletter sign-up. Something to keep a prospect engaged at their liberty without feeling the pressure of a sales person. Something that can keep you front of mind with that prospect.

Sitebrand works with some B2B companies including CableOrganizer.com and they use our web personalization technology to do tons of cool things. To give you a sense of what I mean, here’s an excerpt from our case study:

“CableOrganizer.com has also had great success with key customer campaigns where Sitebrand is used to personalize the site based on the organization’s domain. “It surprises them [our customers] when they show up and see creative that is associated with their logo. I am sure they ask, ‘how did they know that?’” says Shields. Many of these campaigns improved CableOrganizer.com’s conversion rates by almost 10% against control groups that did not see Sitebrand enabled targeted content.”

It’s a great example of savvy B2B marketing so if you want a head start on business technology that’s changing the online landscape, you should read the full case study.

 The blogosphere right now is abuzz with discussions about the current economic downturn and what impact it will have on eCommerce sales, and the associated budgets that eMarketers will be given. 

Forrester research sees eCommerce bucking the downturn trend, with online spending actually going up by a predicted 17% in 2008.  That said there will still be a tightening of belts as far as spending is concerned, with most of the spending freezes taking place against in-site technologies.  Search will continue to grow, as it is both vital to online sales and the most easily provable from a tactical ROI perspective. 

According to our friends at Marketing Sherpa, while “38% of marketers are spending more on online tactics, such as paid search, natural search, email marketing and online events” this growth is happening at the expense of in-site technologies as “B-to-B and B-to-C marketers are conserving budget dollars by renegotiating contracts with vendors and agencies” 

So let me get this straight.  Online stores are spending more money on getting people to walk in the front door of the store, and less money on making sure they walk out of the store with a product in hand.  Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, especially when you listen to an online brand that has a keen grasp of the big picture. 

I listened to a great speech at Shop.org by Patrick Byrne, COO of Overstock.com.  It would take a series of blog posts to detail all the interesting things that have been done/are being done by the Overstock.com team, but two major points stood out:

• While they came late to the party regarding natural search optimization for Google, they have made search a number one priority over the last few years.
• They are in the process of rebuilding their marketing programs, customer service programs and website experience around 5 pre-defined visitor segments.

They recognize that while increased eyeballs on website equals increased revenue, the only way to break the vicious cycle of search reliance is though optimization. 

I know that most of the people reading this don’t have Overstock.com budgets, but try a simple exercise. 

• Pull up an analytics report on the conversion rate for one of the product categories that has received budget for keyword buys and search optimization. 
• Look at the percentage of traffic and conversion rate for the traffic segment. 
• Compare the conversion rate of this type of traffic to your site average and if it is lower, calculate your potential revenue opportunity.

There is a lot of money that gets left on the table by making traffic generation of any type your primary marketing mechanism.  You should be budgeting time and money to optimize visits within your site as a logical component of your search marketing initiatives, especially if you want to take advantage of the 17% growth of the only growing retail market.

Cheers,

Jim