Five Web Marketing Ideas to Recession-Proof Your Job

In these tough times, it pays to explore new skills, strategies and tools that can open up new opportunities.

By Prescott Shibles
Monday, November 10, 2008

In these tough times, it pays to explore new skills, strategies and tools that can open up new opportunities. If necessity is the mother of invention, I have a feeling that 2009 is going to be one of the most innovative years ever in the audience development profession. Email lists are suffering from the affects of list fatigue. Budgets are being cut because of the economy. Telemarketing conversions dropped almost as quickly as the Dow.

Here are five Web marketing ideas to help you turn these challenging times into opportunity.

Web Analytics

Every campaign should have some type of conversion funnel analysis that cuts across your search, email and Web site analytics. Companies like Omniture are already implementing plug-ins that will do this integration for you. Most have conversion funnel reports that visualize where your campaign is getting clogged up.

Emails sent:    90,000    100%
Emails delivered:    85,388    94.8%
Emails opened:    19,655    23.3%
Clicks to form page:    1,475    7.5%
Form Completion:    221    14.9%

There are a lot of books out there to help you get started, but blogs are where the advanced number crunchers hang out.

Search Engine Marketing

If you’re not using search engine marketing (SEM) by now, you really need to find a way to learn it, test it and use it immediately. The reason why Google is so dominant is because they’ve built the most effective and ROI-driven marketing engine the world has ever seen. Why wouldn’t you use it?

For publications that have robust Web sites with lots of traffic, it’s easy to build seed lists from the existing keywords reports. For those publications with little traffic, you’ll want to you use some services that help you identify keyword candidates and research what keywords are working for your competitors. Luckily, there are tools for that as well.

Start an Affiliate Program

Develop a more targeted affiliate network yourself by reaching out to your industry’s blogging community, discussion board moderators, and other complementary Web sites. Offer to pay them an agreed upon amount for any qualified subscription that they generate. Use a service such as Commission Junction or Performics to provide you with the technology, but find the right partner sites yourself.

Usability and Web Form Effectiveness

Retailers constantly measure their fallout rates and make tweaks to their forms and landing pages. This act of constant measurement and tweaking leads to dramatically improved revenue. Media companies are used to thinking of the email, cover tip, postcard and others as the creative. Now, we need to think of the actual form as creative as well.
With the emergence of eye-tracking studies, we now can see the level of disorientation that users have when encountering a form for the first time. If you’re like me and can’t afford an eye-tracking study, time yourself to see how long it takes you to read your landing page copy and fill out your form. Compare your time spent to your readers’.

Use these tools to help identify and correct problems:

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing takes A/B testing to another level. You are able to generate elements of a campaign asset (headline, image, copy, etc.) and create multiple versions of each of these elements. Software combines them in every way possible and measures which are the most effective combinations. This is a godsend because it automates what used to be a tedious manual process and allows you to improve your campaign’s efficiency in real time.

The cheapest way to implement multivariate testing is to use Google Web Site Optimizer on your landing pages. It takes a ton of work off of your team, setup is less than five minutes and it’s free!

Prescott Shibles is CEO of Vital Business Media.