It’s that season again, when it seems just about everyone is opining about what will make 2010 different from the past and how to prepare for it.
One of the better of these that we’ve come across is a post for ClickZ by (no big surprise here) Heidi Cohen. Heidi starts off with a review of some changing online-marketing realities, including:
- Online presence is required, regardless of where your business is transacted. Buyers gather info online first …and not only from your website.
- Marketing is a multistep process, requiring you to provide easily accessible product information at each step of the purchase process.
- Buyers trust their friends, colleagues and other buyers more than they do your advertising.
That said, she goes on to provide a number of tips for marketing success in 2010 and beyond; here are some of them, but you’ll want to click on over for the rest…
- Listen. It’s imperative to know what’s being said about your company and brand. Monitoring social media has become critical for this purpose; but don’t forget to get feedback from your sales and customer service staff, too.
- Provide useful content related to your product or service, on a regular basis and via a variety of vehicles (website, blog, social networks, email, mobile). Try thinking a bit like a publisher.
- Use events – both live and digitally delivered – to connect and deepen relationships with your prospects.
- Test everything; track & measure performance. There’s simply no point wasting budget dollars on promotional vehicles that show themselves to be less effective than alternatives.
- Support online with offline. Advertising, events, direct mail, product packaging… all can be creatively tweaked to tie in with at least your website and perhaps selected online campaigns.
Stay alert to ever-changing trends, track and measure everything, and you should do just fine in 2010.
