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…)

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.