I’m reading the “Marketing in a Downturn” report from Marketing Sherpa and a couple of really interesting facts from their survey jumped out at me.
1) Larger companies are cutting marketing spending more than smaller companies. This make intuitive sense because marketing expenses at larger companies tend to have a lot of brand spend that is not directly tied to sales. It’s easy to make the case to cut those dollars while smaller companies are still squeezing every sale, lead or page view out of their Direct spend.
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One of the principles we base our direct marketing programs on is continuity. This is especially important in the online world where each interaction is a millisecond apart as potential customers click through creative > landing page/site > order process > confirmation email communications. Continuity refers to all elements of the creative through the acquisition and early retention process. For example, through testing we know that the connection between the text in a paid search ad needs to be reflected in the headline in the landing page - this continuity confirms that you are on the correct page to “pay off” the text that you clicked on. It is important to take this message as well as the colors, images, design that you’ve introduced on the landing page and carry through the order process.

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I attended (and spoke) at the Optimization Summit put on by Optimost in San Francisco this week. After sitting through the presentations and talking to folks who attended, I came away believing that testing tools and techniques are getting better, but still not hitting the prime time. Ann Holland (Marketing Sherpa) gave a great presentation on survey results around testing roadblocks and the reality is that people like the idea of testing and want to test but are highly resource constrained. Marketing, creative, IT, etc. are all overloaded with things to do and try so that makes starting up a testing program difficult. In addition, the knowledge on what and how to test is still way behind where I thought it would be by now.

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If you have never used Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) then you are missing out. This handy tools shows you the trend of searches for a single or group of keywords over time. The current version goes back to January 2004 and is now updated daily (used to be monthly and woefully behind in months). So, what is Google Trends good for?:
1. Looking at trends for your most important keywords: brands, specific products, generic works that drive your business, etc. This is a great view on why certain terms might be doing better or worse now than in 2005.
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Bounce rate is a great way to measure the quality of traffic coming to your website. Why?
- It is almost instantly accessible in any web analytics tool.
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We use geo-targeting quite a bit on Google with our higher volume campaigns. If you have the volume, tracking and technical ability to manage a highly decentralized campaign, you can achieve better results through discrete geo targeting, improved positioning and lower CPCs (I’ll cover this in-depth in a future Internet Marketing Review Newsletter).

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Outsell, Inc. recently released a report based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. advertisers stating that online advertising as a whole will grow 17.9% in 2007 with Internet search advertising driving the engine with a 39% growth rate. According to Outsell, Inc. advertising on TV and Radio will decline 3.5% while print media will grow 2.7%.

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