There is lots of speculation about an imminent economic downturn. Whether it’s happening now or will happen later (or much, much later), as marketers, we must ask ourselves how is this going to impact my job, my budget — and my career? How can I prepare for it?

For the last few years, we in the online marketing space have been enjoying pretty strong tailwinds. For the first time in a long time (I have been around the block for a while), Marketing has been able to leverage revenue growth into larger budgets with relative ease.

Scrooge-like CEOs and tight-fisted CFOs have been allowing growth in marketing and advertising budgets less grudgingly than usual. They still consider it ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’ – but have been arguing less with Marketing about the need to spend.

So I wonder how seriously most marketers are taking concerns about a slowdown in the economy when developing and executing their demand-generation and marketing plans.

Whether or not a downturn is imminent, or already here, this is probably a good time for Marketers to take a breath and do some contingency planning.

The current model Marketing has been using to budget goes something like this: “I need a bigger budget because our revenues are growing, and media costs and the cost of pay-per-click keywords are escalating. So if we want growth to continue, we need to spend more”

But what happens when revenue growth slows down? (more…)

Just a few days ago, global management consultancy Accenture announced that it is acquiring Memetrics, a Web optimization testing company. This latest deal in our marketing performance sector follows Omniture acquiring TouchClarity and Offermatica last year and Interwoven buying Optimost.

IMHO these acquisitions represent not so much industry consolidation as a growing awareness (some might say ‘groundswell’) of the opportunity that conversion optimization presents to businesses, large and small, to “do more” with the expensive but anonymous traffic that is already on their websites. And — bonus! — it’s all measurable: it’s all about what customers *demonstrably* prefer and not what management or the web designer *likes*…

But (isn’t there always one?), there are real issues around execution.

Landing page optimization is not about the technology - it’s about business. There are many wonderful online testing tools, including free Google Website Optimizer, which allow marketers to run experiments on their web pages and determine which layout, offer, creative and copy combination deliver the highest number of conversions.

The execution issues revolve around… (more…)

More great news!

Marketing Sherpa published a case study yesterday about a recent Conversion Rate Optimization Funnel Experiment we ran for Safe Software.

The project is a great example of how we can increase lead generation Actions (ie. Conversions) to create a persistent revenue lift for high value, high consideration purchases. At the end of one round of Funnel Experiments, where we created and tested home page and software download page alternatives, we had increased their key lead generation funnel by over 100% (in other words, doubled it!).

You can read Sherpa’s published case here.

We’re excited by the results of these experiments, and so are Jaylene and Jamey from Safe. In fact, we’re doing another Kaizen Method planning session with them this afternoon to continue the improvement. I’ll let you know how the next round goes in a few weeks.

We’re thrilled that Tom Leung has agreed to present a session at the BC Association of Integrated Marketers luncheon on Feb 7th.

Tom Leung

Tom’s session is titled “Google’s Proven Truths About Online Marketing” and is sponsored by WiderFunnel, of course.

The event will be highly interesting and interactive and will sell out.

I’m not bluffing about that. We sent out an email invitation to a few (well, more than a few) of our close contacts yesterday and we just found out that they’ve already sold 25% of the seats within the first 24 hours. The event organizers told us that they “have never seen so many come in so quickly.” We may have to get a bigger room.

You can get all the event details (more…)