MARKETING: Focus on Execution in 2007

While online advertising is still in a high growth phase, interactive marketing is starting to show signs of maturing. For B2B marketers interactive marketing is no longer a novelty, it has become a vital part of their marketing program. To retain and grow relative market share in 2007 translates to executing the basics well. Focus your marketing efforts on improving your website, search, email marketing, metrics and offline marketing that supports and integrates with online marketing initiatives.

Website
As the centerpiece of your online footprint, your website must continually evolve to attract and retain clients while enhancing your brand and corporate image. To this end, consider the following:

Ensure that your web design is clean and easy to navigate for visitors, prospects and clients. Since site usability expectations continue to evolve, your site must as well.
Check that your site is optimized for keywords including brand names, product names and advertising positioning. Important factors to consider are content on your site, site architecture and linking strategy.
Broaden your site’s media offering with webinars, blogs (where this makes sense for your business), podcasts and videocasts. To aid search optimization, include associated text descriptions. Each of these media formats attracts and engages different types of users and provide additional searchable content to aid search optimization.
Make sure that prospective clients and press can easily contact you using the response channel of their choice including email, 800 number, fax or mail. Add links to your contact center in your main navigation, footer links and on every page.

Search
While improved search optimization should be integrated into your website efforts, paid search drives a significant proportion of online sales and requires special focus. It can be handled internally or through a specialized agency. Here are some points to bear in mind:

Track your keyword set regularly. Check the words you use as well as those that your competitors use for both paid and organic placement on the major search engines.
Leverage search’s long tail. For B2B marketers, this can mean focusing on less popular or older model numbers and brand names where there may be less competition for placement.
Test paid search ad copy and related landing pages to ensure they drive optimal results.

Email Marketing
An email database is an important corporate asset that requires continual attention to keep growing. To maximize its value, respect recipient’s time by providing relevant and timely information that they want and need. Here are some suggestions:

Maximize email address collection by including a means to register on every page (except during the check out process), in navigation and in footer links. Also encourage enrollment in all email communications and newsletters. Keep requested information to a minimum to encourage enrollment.
Ensure communications are relevant to minimize unsubscribes. To this end, use behavioral targeting or additional information collected through registration, surveys or past purchases to target messages.
Supplement email with offline communications. While these may cost more, they can break through due to the relatively low level of physical mail. Also, they may engage prospects and clients who don’t open your emailings.

Metrics
As online marketing matures, the importance of monitoring metrics will continue to grow because assessing results enables you to improve your marketing effectiveness. Among the factors to think about are:

Target your business objectives. Set the metrics needed to achieve these goals and monitor them.
Build in metric collection every time you introduce a new promotion or marketing channel
Track competitors’ relative performance to ensure that you’re maintaining relative market share. Just assessing internal year-over-year growth may not reveal changes in market position.

Offline Interaction
Since online interaction may be only part of the marketing process, it’s critical to ensure that your online and offline efforts complement and enhance each other. To that end, here are some suggestions:

Ensure offline collateral reference your website and provide means to contact your firm electronically.
Use your website to collect offline contact information. This is particularly important for direct mail efforts where the media cost is high and response is less than 2%. Gathering postal information from prospects enables you to re-contact them without paying for media to acquire their name again.
Consider offline communications when email addresses no longer work or registrants unsubscribe. While these marketing messages may have a higher cost, it can be worthwhile as a means of continuing the dialog.

To ensure that your marketing is on course for 2007, get back to the basics and execute well. This will let you maximize your return, maintain relative market share and drive your growth. Your goal is to continually make incremental improvements that add up to more profitable market share.

Heidi Cohen's Bio: Heidi Cohen is the principal of Riverside Marketing Strategies, an interactive marketing consultancy. She has over 20 years experience helping clients increase profitability by developing innovative marketing programs based on solid analytics to extend customer relationships. Riverside Marketing Strategies clients include the New York Times Digital, AccuWeather.com, Cheap Tickets and the UJA. Additionally, Riverside Marketing Strategies has worked with numerous online content/media companies and e-tailers.

Prior to starting Riverside Marketing Strategies, Heidi Cohen held senior level marketing positions at The Economist, the Bookspan/ Doubleday Direct division of Bertelsmann and Citibank.

Heidi is a member of the faculty of NYU’s Masters in Direct and Interactive Marketing program. In 2006, she received NYU’s Outstanding Service award.

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