Marketing tactics to think about for 2009

As we enter into more uncertain times, marketers need all the help they can get.

Tactics should, of course, slot into an overall strategy: nevertheless, with online tools changing so quickly, you might appreciate a checklist of cost-effective, online techniques which, if you haven’t tried, might be part of your 2009 armoury.

1. Search engine keywords. Revise your master list of keywords and long-tail items and integrate some value-related adjectives into phrases. All buyers are looking for value-for-money and will be using these phrases in searches.

2. Website: the customer ‘journey’. Focus on your prospect and customer journey through your website and, wherever possible, make the path to buying as smooth and easy as possible. Check your website analytics for buyers who give up along the way and redesign the journey, making the drop-off stages simpler.

3. Social media. Spend time on an assessment of social media which will return a tangible benefit for your company and marketplace. Remember that involvement and links produce a matrix of references for search engines and the digital benefits may even outweigh the value of the human relationships you make. If you are a consumer marketeer, get your team together and use their brainpower and social media experience to brainstorm some widgets to engage an online audience with.

4. Email marketing. Re-examine all your assumptions about your programme. Take a closer look at your statistics and see if you draw some conclusions about what is going well and not so well. Ensure that you have a checklist of the main components that should be in place so that you can check them off (click here to download one from Juice Digital). Run an online survey among an audience sample to see if you can improve your content (most email service providers offer a survey option).

5. Website: develop rapidly-changing content. Our experience tells us that, despite being in possession of sophisticated content management tools, organisations have difficulty in finding the time or inspiration to develop relevant changing content which will boost search engine ratings. We have a number of solutions and a team to help you with this.

6. Twitter. Like many social media platforms, Twitter can get spectacular results if you catch the zeitgeist and use etiquette that adds value to your Followers’ experience. We have a solid checklist to help you: just ask.

7. Interactive voice messaging (IVM). Bluetooth, text (SMS) and IVM all use the most common technology platform of all, the mobile phone. There is a place, and successful tactics, for each of these tools. For B2B marketers, your audience will have a far proportion of touchscreen phones like the Blackberry Storm and Apple’s iPhone. How are you engaging your prospects and customers?

8. Social media press releases (SMPR). This is the tip of the PR 2.0 iceberg. Ensure that you grasp where PR is going and what it means online. Have you grasped the significance of semantic mark-up and how you can build an automated SMPR platform?

9. Blogs. That old chestnut! Blogs are very useful, fast-changing barometers of your thinking and marketing messages. They can be built as an adjunct to your website but have a more personal, informal flavour and allow customer interaction. And, of course, the links back to your website can produce Google-juice.

10. Buzz monitoring. Use freely-available tools to keep track of your company reputation or even spy on your competition. Larger organisations use agencies like Juice Digital to do this professionally but we have compiled a list of over 25 buzz monitoring tools to track news, blogs, patents, video, job listings, conference calls, events, keywords, websites, bespoke RSS tracking. See the list here [link].

11. Podcasts. Consider communicating through short audio or videocasts and embed them in your website or blog.

Article by Jeremy Dent at
http://blog.juicedigital.co.uk/2009/01/marketing-tactics-to-think-about-for-2009/