In this week’s SherpaBlog, the brilliant Anne Holland presents the positions of two camps, the Brand Camp vs A/B Camp, and their approaches to beating the recession. “Whichever side you’re on — brand vs A/B — someone else on your team is evangelizing the other direction as the best way to beat the recession,” she writes.

However, with the due respect owed, I question one of her conclusions: “Who’s right and who’s wrong?” she writes. “Hate to say it, especially as a chief proponent of measurement in marketing, but brand should always win.” (more…)

According to MarketingSherpa’s “Search Marketing Benchmark Survey,” search marketing budgets are set to increase in 2008. OK, nothing new here.

But wait, here is the gem:

According to Stefan Tornquist, MarketingSherpa’s research director, “Most of the budgets were growing because search marketers thought that keyword prices would go up”

So, in other words, marketers will spend increasing amounts — to get the same results.

WOW, that’s impressive.

*Smart* marketers, however, will optimize the online conversion rate and get more business from the traffic *already* coming to the site…

So - no need to increase the budget. Just market smarter.

At Chief Marketer, Anne Holland (of MarketingSherpa, of course) reveals the results of a New Eyetracking Heatmap: 6 Ways to Get More Webinar Sign-Ups. We had previously purchased this research and interpreted the learning for our clients.

The results aren’t ground-breaking, which probably means they are worth repeating. The basic principles behind successful landing page design don’t change that much. The skill is the ability to sort the myriad principles and apply ONLY the relevant ones scientifically to each unique situation.

You need to be careful about which conclusions you draw from heatmaps, though. They’re great for revealing surprising areas of focus on your site, but the learnings can only be reliably applied to the page being tested.

The heatmap is, of course, highly influenced by the content on the page. You’ll always find hot spots where there’s an image of a person, regardless of where you place it on the page. So, don’t tell me that you’ve found a great place to put the person’s image just because everyone’s looking at it there, okay?

On a related note, WiderFunnel recently ran a Funnel Experiment™ on a webinar pre-registration page and saw a 290% conversion rate increase! I hope to write a brief case study on it when I have a spare hour.

If you are considering writing an application for FaceBook - beware, as we may be reaching saturation point when it comes to this fast growing online community.

To read more, check out what Anne Holland, the guru at MarketingSherpa has to say at www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30010 … and you can then read my comments, which she also published on her blog, at
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30023