Shift from Offline and Brand to Online and Direct Tactics during economic downturn

In today's economic climate, marketers need to accurately predict, measure and optimize tactical results pushing the industry toward direct and online answers.

According to MarketingSherpa: "only 12% of marketers predict increases to traditional budgets compared to 31% who expect online increases. More importantly, perhaps, this roughly balances out those predicting reductions. There’s more good news for online marketing, as larger companies are somewhat more likely than the average to plan increases as budget is reallocated from more expensive offline efforts".

Dropping registration barriers increases awareness by almost 50%

Dropping registration barriers, such as data capture forms, can triple the number of people who download your content. If the content is good, they will pass it onto collegues so you could potentially educate 50% more prospects. If 48 more people are educated, how many more interested leads do you think you could get?

A tip to getting data capture from a nurtured lead: Give them the registration free content and tell them if they want more white papers / case studies / best practice guides visit your website landing page. If you ask for their data at this stage, they'll be more than happy to give it!

Increasing Online Advertising ROI

7 top design tactics to increase click through rates:

Are you a methodical, spontaneous or competitive persona?

Customers can be split into different persona's - understanding a customer's inner diolog allows you to design an experience that addresses customer concerns in context of that dialog.

There are people that make decisions logically and those who base them on emotion. Also, those who decide quickly, and those who take their time.

Websites should be carefully constructed to persuade these different personas to lead someone intuitively to the information they need - see persuasion pathways.

Viral Marketing : Patterns of Sucess

The best viral campaigns appear to follow the same patterns:

http://www.shipsbiscuit.com/2008/07/11/viral-marketing-god-patterns-in-viral-marketing/