Thought Leadership: Planning Considerations for '09

It’s that time of year to set your game plan for the new year. Based on the trends we’re seeing and what we’ve learned is working for our clients, I’d encourage you to include the following five key actions in your 2009 checklist. If you’d like to discuss any of these in more detail, please give me a call.

1. Turn your current customers into your most vocal advocates. Clear evidence suggests that your potential customers believe the most trusted source of information about you is your current customers. According to a recent Nielsen Global Survey, nearly 78% of respondents trusted recommendations from consumers a total of 15 percentage points higher than the second-most-credible source, newspapers.^[1] Take a risk this year and open up the channel of communication between the two groups. To do this, try technologies that help users generate content, including user ratings and reviews, online forums and blogs. You can also consider using increasingly popular forms of company-managed content, including webcasts, podcasts and videos that include or feature your customers.


2. Integrate your Web system with your selling system. Surprisingly, many company leaders have a divided view of their websites: they are either simple brochure-ware or full e-commerce tools. Some retailers have actually turned off their sites because of the friction between the “bricks” business unit and the “clicks” business unit. Some enterprise-focused marketers are restricting content because they want to save it for their direct sales force to present. One main reason should compel you to expand your site’s capabilities to accelerate the selling process, be it generating store traffic or sales lead, and that is: Customers demand it. Buyers expect to learn a great deal about you and your products from your site, so enable them to do so. Your site is becoming the center of engagement with prospects and customers, so break through the internal politics or historical reticence and improve user experience and your business in the process.


3. Continue to shift from traditional to digital media. Why? Because that is how your customers get information, entertain themselves and communicate with their families, friends and colleagues. Advertising in digital media can be highly targeted, very relevant, extremely engaging and, as a result, highly effective. It can advance both brand development goals and traffic-driving/lead-generation goals. We’ve seen clients shift almost all of their media budgets from traditional to digital media over the past year with very positive results. If you haven’t made the shift yet, make 2009 the year to do so.


4. Give your search marketing program new life. For many companies, search marketing has become a staple of their traffic-driving and lead- generation activities. It is highly efficient in capturing people who are looking for what you offer. The challenge for 2009 is that the efficiency of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is declining. You’ll probably spend more but get fewer results next year unless you make two changes. The first is to re-energize your search engine optimization tactics with focused content development and content syndication activities. Link baiting is a tactic that falls into this approach. Look at investing media dollars in developing content that is designed to drive traffic to your site. This may be difficult in some companies that have siloed organizations and budgets, but you should figure out a way around this self-imposed constraint. The second change is to enhance your search analytics. It is time to be more precise in assessing what really works and to get more sophisticated in your approach to testing. Broad-brush, loosely managed PPC programs won’t cut it next year.


5. Incorporate social marketing in your mix. Everyone is talking about Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, but social marketing is more than creating a company profile on one of these sites or posting an entertaining video on YouTube or MySpace. We’ve sorted the range of options into five major categories and the odds are that one or more of these makes good business sense for you to explore in the coming year.

Type	Uses	Examples
Social networking communities	Link together to share content and messages about oneself	Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn
User-generated content sites	Create and share content in the forms of words, pictures or videos	YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers
Blogs	Authors share their perspective, readers comment	Gizmodo, Gawker, HuffingtonPost, news and corporate blogs
Social news portals	The community votes to increase or decrease its visibility, submit content	Digg, Reddit, Propeller
Social book marking sites	Content and links are tagged and saved, with the most popular visibility	Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon

[1]“Word-of-Mouth the Most Powerful Selling Tool: Nielsen Global Survey.” 1 Oct 2007. Nielsen Company. .

Engaging with your target market through these various sites takes a new way of thinking that doesn’t fit neatly into most current marketing structures. You may need to find both an internal champion and an external resource in order to make progress here. Let us know if we can help.

I’m sure that there are many more issues that you must deal with in your 2009 plan, but if you can include these five on your agenda, you’ll be a step ahead of most of your competitors. Good luck and Happy New Year.