The Lifestream of Jon Moss

Post from the Comments- Rebekkah Hilgraves

October 16 2008, 11:38am

From yesterday’s request to have others post instead of me, here’s one from Rebekkah Hilgraves: One of the things I tell my clients when I’m discussing new media marketing with them is how much blogging, newsletters, podcasts and so on will add to the human value of what they’re doing (it seems an oxymoron, when you think about it!). Using these tools, we get to put a name and a face and a personality to a business that would otherwise fade into anonymity and thus obscurity. And in these days of the big box store (sacrificing human contact on the altar of convenience and/or low price), that can make the difference between a company’s success or failure. They still want to know about conversions. One of the things that still presents a challenge is tracking blog readers, for example, from first contact to RFI to conversion. Once they fill out an RFI it’s much easier, but getting good statistics on what got them there in the first place is still something of an obstacle. I want to know what works, so that we can spend their marketing dollars effectively. We have found that tricks such as online-printable coupons help bring people in the door (literally or figuratively), but that doesn’t apply to every business, of course. And not every company can afford the big-ticket leadGen providers such as Eloqua (as fabulous as it is!). And of course we try to track movement using analytics. It mostly works, but is not as accurate as we might like. The little guys (or at least the littlER guys) need to know how effective their campaigns are just as much as, if not more than, the big guys. There’s not much room for trial and error in smaller businesses! Further, when one has a client who is a self-proclaimed troglodyte, we want to present tools that will be friendly, usable and with a short learning curve. We want to make this easier on them, not harder! Rebekkah Hilgraves blogs at http://www.shetech.com.