Yesterday, we attended the Search Marketing Expo West event in Santa Clara, California. One of the topics that captured our interest was the Landing Page and Multivariate Testing session. The goal of landing page testing is to increase the number of visitors that become customers on a business’ website.

After listening to the panelists present case studies with results and innovations for testing, we asked the panel about risk management. Specifically, with client budgets on the line, what is the best approach to manage and limit risk from a testing regimen?

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In the last post on Line of Sight Marketing, the focus was on capturing website visitors contact information for an email marketing program. In this post, we explore how advertising buys that are intended to prospect for new customers can employ line of sight marketing without requiring the user to register or login.

One of the key tools in an advertiser’s toolbox is the “cookie.” Cookies are a common component of most website tracking and online advertising targeting systems and are defined as: “A message given to a Web browser by a Web server. The browser stores the message in a text file. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.”

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One of your most important assets is your customer list. Managing this asset effectively is as critical as managing your finances or intellectual property. One of the most important things you can do with your customer list is to retain a ‘line of sight’ with each customer.

Line of sight marketing implies that the conversation with the customer is continuous and uninterrupted. When the line of sight is broken, the connection with the customer is over and the customer must be ‘found’ again or replcaed before restarting the conversation.

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Financial institutions are failing. Fortune 500 marketers are cutting budgets. Inflation is increasing. Consumer spending is uncertain. Trade deficits are rising.

The news is filled with dire headlines and seemingly worse news everyday. The market appears to be moving to a more conservative state. Through all this, you still have a business to run and grow. Here are five best practices for your marketing to help you come out ahead during an uncertain economy.
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You built a website. You have a list of keywords. You wrote some catchy ads. Now what? Before you spend another dollar, take a look at your conversion rate because you can save a lot of money and win a lot more customers by improving this metric. This might sound like a difficult process, but the good news is that there are a number of free and easy to use tools you can use to improve your conversion rate today.

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There is a popular misconception in the Web 2.0 world that if you build it, they will come and that marketing is not necessary because the web gives everyone a platform to launch an app, tool, product, service, whatever. The team at Thrivepoint has worked with hundreds of startups and growing businesses, and it says here:

Very little in life is guaranteed but if you fail to recognize the importance of sales and marketing to your business, your business will fail.

Marketing is the sum of all activities that a business does to put the product in the customers hands. It starts with the customer and ends with the customer. And if you ignore the customer, you will find yourself without them.
So if marketing is necessary, why are successful business people claiming it is not?

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[disclosure] Thrivepoint is receiving a free t-shirt for posting the following

Today, we received an email from Powerset, the much anticipated semantic search engine, asking us if we wanted a free t-shirt. Who doesn’t? All we needed to do was use the Factz feature on www.powerset.com and post our thoughts in our blog. What a great marketing idea. Reach influencers. Make it fun. Get the word out virally. Nice SEO bump. All for the cost of a t-shirt ($10) and postage ($1). Brilliant.

We typed in the query, “powerset” at www.powerset.com and received the following Factz:

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Your success is largely dependent upon the success of your marketing. And while marketing can be difficult or intimidating, it can also be a lot of fun, creative and energizing. The steps outlined in this post are designed to help you get the ball rolling and the ideas flowing.

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Unlike TV or yellow pages or other advertising media, a website’s unique and powerful advantage is its ability to create an opportunity to interact and engage your customer in a converstaion. But the site has to be set up to have that conversation and as the website owner, you exclusively hold the burden of carrying a one-sided conversation long enough and in such an engaging manner so that the visitor wants to join in. In other words, it takes time, trust, credibility and a host of other factors for a website visitor to make the leap from anonymous visitor to prospective customer.

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