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…)

We’ve been saying for a long time now that Conversion Optimization is an important tactic to include in your “economic downturn strategy”.

While I think Forbes may be premature in it’s optimism that online advertising will avoid feeling a Recession, it’s our belief that Conversion Optimization at least should be counter-cyclical.

Online marketing is clearly more measurable and accountable than offline and deserves to have an increasing proportion of advertising spend. But that also means that it will get even more competitive and expensive as the large players pour more effort into it. During difficult times you need to spend more time sharpening your axe to increase your competiveness.

Ed note: What’s the best way to sharpen your internet marketing axe? Try Conversion Optimization.

With evidence of a market downturn appearing daily in the media, it’s only a matter of time before marketers’ budgets get slashed. The good news is that in a difficult economy, only the smart survive, and when the economy inevitably rebounds, you may be able to leapfrog your competition. (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…)