Marketing: Holiday '09 Starts Now

One of the most valued aspects of online marketing is advertisers’ ability to nimbly direct their campaigns through a constantly evolving cyber landscape. Unfortunately, feeling nimble doesn’t mean you are nimble, which leaves the old adage echoing in the rafters: “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

Despite increasing resources budgeted to e-commerce, there’s a fading sense of planning and preparedness from online marketers. Like so many aspects of commerce, marketing is a data-driven process supplemented by elements of creative. In designing your prospecting program for the holiday season, do the due diligence now to prepare all your online channels for success.

Collect All Data and Test
Have you collected enough data this year to make educated decisions about the new applications available to online marketers? In just the past six months, new types of media have become a more important part of our everyday lives. Testing early will allow you to release an effective application, like an iPhone app for the holidays.

If leveraging iPhones, Twitter or Facebook leaves you scratching your head, ask your customers — they’re using them. There’s a good chance they’ll use them when making holiday purchases, too.

Set up tests to interact across all your channels, with a seamless passage for users to navigate between them.

Holistic Online Marketing
Too many mediums in online marketing are viewed as on-off, plug-in solutions. There’s a natural tendency to treat different mediums with a sense of autonomy from your Web site and from one another. If the increasing landscape of Web 2.0 users (soon to be Web 3.0 users) has taught us anything, it’s that no medium exists as an island. A funny YouTube video will be posted on a blog somewhere, and your nephew will link his Facebook profile to it.