Best Recession Marketing Investment? Relationships

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/02/best-recession-marketing-investment-relationships/

“As companies decide where to invest their limited marketing resources, there is a distinct opportunity to focus on investing in relationships: with their customers, prospects, employees and business partners.”

I think it’s mind-boggling that this still has to be said.

Internet Marketers are from Mars. Traditional Marketers are from Venus.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4556/Internet-Marketers-are-from-Mars-Traditional-Marketers-are-from-Venus.aspx

“Traditional marketers always start with branding and messaging. I still have trouble accepting that it really helps to pay someone $3k-$20k to tell a small business how to position their products or services.”

Amen to that.

Best Marketing Practices? Think “Blog,” “Website” and “SEO”

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/4555/Best-Marketing-Practices-Think-Blog-Website-and-SEO.aspx

Interesting if obviously unscientific. I’ve found Wordle useful myself for internal ‘persuasion’ purposes … some people are just more comfortable when information is presented to them in an easily parsed visual manner such as this.

Reputation Management for Affiliate Marketing

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/01/reputation-management-for-affiliate-marketing/

“Affiliates become the “face of the brand” for those consumers interacting. However, in many cases, there are very specific limitations to brand name use and both merchants and affiliate networks need to monitor what’s being promoted and how. It’s important to know about how affiliates are using brand names and whether there are anti-marketers or infringement issues. “

Oh, I’ve seen this happen, and the results were not good. Brands need to keep a very close eye on how they are being represented by any affiliates they use.

The linked articles on digital reputation management / online reputation management are worth a look as well.

Should Marketers Shift Offline Budgets to Digital Marketing?

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/01/shift-budgets-digital-marketing/

Emm, the bottom line is that they should be re-evaluating the weighting of their spend on online relative to offline. This is borne out in the answers provided to the question posed by Lee on LinkedIn.

In my opinion, offline is still too expensive unless you are in the situation where you have to advertise regularly for brand reinforcement purposes.