Web marketing - it's too early to define best practices

An infographic from Dream Systems Media Blog gives an overview how marketing developed since the 19th century. It puts marketing in perspective as a relatively young discipline where development is accelerating fast. Marketing surely is more complicated now than it was 10 years ago. It shows that much of what we're using as marketers today is relatively new and untested. We should probably be more humble and learn to use these new channels rather than starting to define best practices.

How much time does blogging take?

If you’re considering to start a blog, how much time will it take? If you’re already blogging, do you spend too much time, or not enough? The answer to these questions depend on many parameters, but at least, a few benchmarks can help.

The monthly time to run a blog is simple math. Multiply the average hours you spend per article by the number of articles you intend to post. Then add an overhead percentage for the nurturing time to promote your blog, moderate comments, participate to the blogosphere, …

Checklist for a marketing campaign

When starting a new marketing campaign, the following checklist helps you asking a few questions to focus your mind. Answering these questions will make it much easier to plan and implement a campaign. Difficulty to answer them may lead you to conduct further research prior to committing to the campaign.

This list of questions has been based on Bob Bly's excellent book on copywriting. It can be used at the start, middle or end of a campaign, respectively for planning, evaluation or impact assessment.

Is microblogging suitable for business marketing?

If you're a business marketer and worried that you're missing the boat on microblogging, don't be too much concerned. The uses for microblogging in business are rather limited. But microblogging has some potential to become a productive part of the future business marketing mix.

40 online marketing methods

Inspired by an article from Junta42, hereby the ultimate list of web-based methods to provide relevant content to users. These can be used for business development, non-profit marketing or to build strong reputations and brands online.

Establishing thought leadership
First a group of techniques to upgrade your users, while establishing you as a thought leader on your subject.

#1 Blogs: the ideal method to build up audiences, to integrate your various content streams on the internet and to support your corporate web presence. With their natural fit to SEO and social bookmarking tools, a blog in your niche can be invaluable.
#2 White papers: build a library of white papers, i.e. persuasive briefing documents on issues in your sector. A white paper is typically 8-10 pages long, and contains about 15,000 characters in a simple, airy layout with ample functional graphics and tables.

The rise and fall of the marketing Ps

Since Kotler, marketing has been about the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. But for content marketers, the actual 4 Ps are Planning, Production, Publishing, Promotion (see PodWorx ‘the 4 Ps of podcasting‘), bringing the total to 7. A recent question at MarketingProfs asks about the 7 Ps of marketing, adding Policy, Partnership and Politics, bringing us to 10.

Wikipedia’s 7 Ps add People, Process and Physical evidence. And new marketing’s 4 Ps are Personalisation, Participation, Peer-to-peer and Predictive Modelling. But marketing is also rePutation, Packaging, Perspective, …

Strategic clarity and alignment

Anecdote provides a test on strategic clarity that most organisations would probably fail.

The difficulty with strategic planning is that experts scramble to focus planning efforts around their pet subjects. Department heads want to include as much freedom as possible, making strategic planning an exercise in dilution. Finally, forces tend to mobilise against the poor executive who wants to set a new direction for the future.Too often, the outcome is more of the same, with a slightly different flavour.

A lack of clarity and strong alignment is not necessarily a recipe for disaster. In Planet Google, Randall Stross describes Google as a loose federation of strong individuals and autonomous teams, rather than the focussed and effective organisation that we perceive from the outside. There is only one Google, but there are many organisations consisting of strong-willed individuals almost beyond the control of their management.