What Does 2009 Have in Store for You? - Marketing Watchdog Journal

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		December 2008, Issue 58

Feature Article
What Does 2009 Have in Store for You?
By Bulldog Solutions Subject Matter Experts

The Web Is Crowded, Open Rates Are Passé, Pownce Is Dead and More.

In which area do you expect to see the most changes in 2009? ( polls)

Our subject matter experts weigh in on social media, e-mail metrics and the need for strategy (do you have one?) for 2009. Read what they think below, and then take our poll on the right. We'd love to hear what you think, and we'll share the results with you in 2009!

Tom Pearson
Marketing Communications Specialist
The BtoB world will rethink the way it measures e-mail marketing ROI. Open rates, click-through rates, and even click-to-open ratios will start to seem passé and incomplete. E-marketers will begin to shift their allegiance to data such as qualified leads, conversion rates and deals closed—these are more accurate representations of a given e-mail campaign's ROI.

Ahmed Taleb
Director of Strategic Planning
BtoB marketers will wade slowly into the 2009 marketing year as they finalize shifting budgets and test the waters. Marketers will continue to look to proven vehicles such as e-mail, search and rich media content. Marketing dollars will continue to move online to take advantage of program measurability, but shift away from branding initiatives in favor of outreach tactics that are more likely to impact the bottom line.

Rob Solomon
CEO
BtoB firms are shifting their marketing spend to the Web. That's great news if you're an online marketing firm. It's bad news if you're a business that doesn't have a really well-thought-out strategy on how to make online marketing work for you. The Web is getting extremely crowded—so many companies looking for customers and so many potential customers looking for solutions to their problems. If finding your company online is like searching for a needle in a haystack, guess what's going to happen? Strategy has never been more important than it is now. What's yours?

Tracy Wolczanski
Client Services Manager
We're going to see each marketing program scrutinized more closely then ever before, milked for every bit of performance we can get out of it, and watched closely by more stakeholders as companies are faced with tough decisions about each dollar spent. This means marketers who pay close attention to their data will be in the best position to succeed.

Amy Bills
Senior Manager of Field Marketing
In 2008 marketers tripped over themselves to embrace social media tactics, with varying degrees of success. In 2009, a tactic that isn't a "sure thing" drops to the bottom of the marketing to-do list. We'll see a social media shakeout, with useful social media tactics growing in popularity and offering more possibilities, and others retiring or morphing (see "Goodbye Pownce, Hello Six Apart" or "Twitter's Bad News Is a Bad Business.") This is a natural and necessary evolution, and in due time (and better days to come) it will help creative marketers prove the value of social media to skeptical CMOs.

Kate Lacey
Senior Account Strategist
Marketing and Sales will continue to work toward tighter alignment. Departments that have grown complacent about operating in silos-field marketing, corporate communications and event marketing—will find that integrating programs for maximum budget effectiveness and ROI is fast becoming not just a "nice-to-have," but a mandate.

Chris Parisi
VP, Technology
With budgets likely to come under much more scrutiny, sales and marketing teams will be forced to get creative with the technology they already have, whether that's marketing automation, CRM, internal wikis and communications options, or all of the above. To me that's actually an exciting prospect: The necessity of doing more with less can breed some pretty powerful solutions we might not have thought about in easier times.

Mia Erichson
Account Director
Mandated by political policies and patient groups advocating the adoption of electronic health records, technology is transforming the healthcare setting. In turn, marketers will increasingly turn to online initiatives to communicate with their healthcare end users.

You heard it here first, folks. What are your predictions for 2009? We'd love to hear what you think. Take our poll at the top of this page, and we'll report back on the results.

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Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.