At a time in the economic cycle when lead generation and sales enablement is most needed, when Marketers should be rethinking every investment they make and how it helps their company increase sales, a new and important study by the CMO Council comes out reporting that less than 20% of respondents say their Sales and Marketing organizations are extremely collaborative. (Read the report here) (more…)

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…)

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.

For years now I have been subscribing to my RSS feeds in MyYahoo. If some headline and brief summary seemed interesting, I would of course click through to the source of the article to read the full text.

From a traffic-building perspective, this worked very well for the publishers of content that interests me: as long as the brief copy presented was relevant, I was bound to click-through to read all of it.

But no longer.

With the new MyYahoo! Portal format, I can now mouse over the RSS feeds and read what seems to me to be the complete article or post without having to click through to the website publishing the content.

This is bound to have an impact on the ability of RSS feeds to generate traffic to websites and will put more pressure on copywriting skills so that people actually want to get the full story after mousing over…