If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading. – Lao Tzu

With Q1 about to come to a close, it’s time for businesses to begin the process of analyzing quarterly results. This means diving into the numbers and evaluating how business is going. For many small business owners this can be a painful process particularly if business results are in the toilet and the sales pipeline has slowed to a trickle.

Are your revenues stuck in neutral or declining?

As the old Dylan song says, “The Times, They Are A-Changing’.” It’s no longer business as usual. The internet, Google and social media have rapidly shifted the playing field and for those companies that have been slow to adjust to these new dynamics, it may seem like business has become difficult overnight.

While it is convenient to blame your business woes on macro-issues like the politicians in Washington, the poor economy or global climate change, it’s possible there may be a simpler and more painful reality.

Your marketing strategy really sucks!

Many businesses quite frankly are stuck in an outdated mode of thinking when it comes to marketing their businesses, using traditional marketing techniques suited to a bygone era.

Traditional marketing, or outbound marketing, is comfortable because it’s conventional, safe and has worked in the past. Included in these “legacy” tactics are:

• Yellow Page Ads
• Brochures and Flyers
• Coupons
• Door Knockers
• Cold-Calling
• Direct Mail
• Radio
• TV Spots
• Telemarketing

Sure, it’s still possible to reach a great deal of potential customers with these “shotgun” methods aimed at any potential customer that can fog a mirror. However, chances AREN’T good that a random recipient of your marketing collateral is just sitting around waiting to purchase your product or service, particularly if they were not searching for it in the first place.

For many businesses, good money is being thrown at these strategies with little to no tangible results.

Buying Behavior Has Most Definitely Shifted

While traditional marketing methods have remained the same for many companies, buying behavior has changed drastically over the last decade. Cold-calling is perceived as a rude intrusion, and direct mail is intercepted by gatekeepers and thrown away before it’s even opened.

The most significant trend however, is the ability for buyers do their own research online prior to stepping foot in a showroom, or prior to scheduling an appointment with a sales person. The internet is the “great equalizer” that has tilted the sales process in the favor of the purchaser.

60% of the research and decision-making is done prior to you knowing that a prospect is in the market for your goods or services, and if your website is not optimized to
capitalize on this trend, your business is in serious T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

Inbound Marketing Allows You to Connect With Your Ideal Customers

In order to respond to this dynamic shift in behavioral patterns, inbound marketing has emerged as the new paradigm for savvy companies of all sizes to transact business in the digital age. Inbound marketing allows you to interact with businesses and consumers during the research and decision making process and capture the attention of your most coveted prospects along their journey from problem identification through purchase: their “Buyer’s Journey.”

By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects to your business, nurtures them, helps turn them into customers and if executed flawlessly, keeps them coming back for more.

Some of the most important tools to attract your ideal customers to your site and show how much you care as businesses are:

Blogging- A blog is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website. In order to get found by the right prospective customers, you must create educational content that speaks to them and answers their questions.

Premium Content- Premium content development includes eBooks, white papers, slide shares, Infographics, videos, podcasts and webinars. These items provide quality information that educate, inform and guide your prospects through their journey.

Social Media Engagement- You must share remarkable content and valuable information on the social web. Social media engagement, utilizing Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google + and Pinterest have become the go-to methods of engaging with prospects. These tools allow you to put a human face on your brand. It is necessary to interact with your prospects where they hang out online.

Keywords- Your customers begin their buying process online, usually by using a search engine to find something they have questions about. To make sure you are appearing prominently when they search, you need to carefully and analytically pick keywords, optimize your pages, create content, and build links around the terms your ideal buyers are searching for.

Pages- You must optimize your website to appeal to and speak with your ideal buyers. Transform your website into a beacon of helpful content to entice the right strangers to visit your pages.

It’s Time to Redirect the Marketing Budget

Talk to any small business owner and they will tell you that this shift in consumer behavior is easily recognizable. Just go to a restaurant or coffee shop and take a look at the people glued to their mobile phones, laptops and tablets. Intuitively we know that things are different than they were even just a few short years ago, and for all but those few with their heads in the sand, this radical shift is evident.

Understanding this trend is the easy part, but knowing what to do about it is an entirely different matter. It’s a tall order for many business owners to shift away from marketing tactics that have provided great results in the past, and moving towards this unknown world. However, for those that wish to survive and thrive in the coming years, this move is necessary.

It’s time! In the midst of THIS quarterly review, DIVE into the numbers and look at where the majority of your marketing dollars are flowing.

An inbound marketing budget, particularly for B2B businesses will contain line items such as:

• Collateral development and production
• Content development specialists
• Email programs
• E-newsletters
• Graphic artists
• Market research
• Marketing software
• Metrics/data analysts
• Mobile marketing specialists
• PPC
• Printing
• PR specialists
• SEO/keyword research
• Social media specialists
• Special events
• Sponsorship
• Website development/re-engineering

If your budget contains none of these items, and you are still throwing the majority of your money at trade shows, advertisements, entertainment and dining and a whole host of offline other marketing tactics, you have some work to do.

Why?

Because right now, your ideal clients have a problem that your business is ideally positioned to help them with. While you are reading this article, they are searching online this second to understand their problem, and they are looking for “great” companies to do business with.

The question remains.

Are They Going To Find You? It’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work! What’s in your budget?

As competition intensifies, coming in all new shapes and sizes, global e-commerce organizations face challenges in differentiating their offerings with key audiences. To succeed, marketers cannot afford to miss opportunities to improve the effectiveness, reach, and return of their marketing and sales programs.  Yet, a recent survey we conducted with 160 global retailers found the majority are missing out on significant opportunities to use tools that already exist in their arsenal to improve theROI of marketing campaigns.

According to the survey, online retailers are prioritizing their e-commerce platform, site search, and SEO, as well as mobile and customer-focused analytics. Still, nearly 60% admitted to not using site search reports and information to enhance marketing programs, and only 25% say they integrate site search data into email marketing campaigns to better customize offers for customers—implying there is still a great deal of value organizations can pursue, from integrating site search information to integrating their marketing campaigns.

Interestingly, half of the survey respondents said they are not doing more with site search to enhance marketing and sales programs due to limited resources, while nearly 30% say they just aren't sure how to do it and 10% note that their existing site search solution does not allow for integration with marketing programs.

Savvy online retailers reap rich benefits from site search

Every retailer knows site search is a must-have element of any online business—yet it's clear they're not taking full advantage of the rich benefits site search can provide to marketing and sales strategies.  With the right approach, online retail marketers can glean valuable insights into visitor habits and buying behavior to help them deliver a richer user experience—which, in turn, can encourage a purchase.

Take, for example, gourmet candy maker Jelly Belly, which uses site search data to ensure that the appropriate top-searched keywords are incorporated into press releases, advertising, and marketing materials. Jelly Belly also uses site search merchandising capabilities to tune results and create landing pages for customized product groupings.

For a previous Cinco de Mayo promotion, Jelly Belly grouped various beans together to create “recipes” for tres leches cake and Mexican hot chocolate. The company then used the URLs of those dedicated landing pages for display advertising, retargeting, and email campaigns. Jelly Belly also dropped a banner tool onto the page to tie the promotional assets from the email or banner ad to the landing page. The result was an 85% increase in open rates for direct mail campaigns.

Site search improves decision making

You don't have to be a master at harnessing a large amount of data in order to make the important information work for you. Data gleaned from site search can be incredibly helpful in the decision making process.

According to our poll, half of retailers currently use site search data and analytics to enhance their business offerings or processes, while 28% use site search data to make smarter decisions related to inventory selection, 26% use site search data to enhance customer service, and 18% use it to augment predictive analytics practices.

The majority of retailers say they have not implemented site search features such as auto-complete with graphics (55%), mouse-over pop-ups (59%), personalized search history (64%), refinements (43%), or a floating search bar (80%). Most merely rely on site search features they have already, such as auto-complete (62%) and refinements (43%) to do the job—a significant miss for these retailers.

The good news is, nearly half (47%) of retailers plan to change their ways, and will work to incorporate more features, functionality, and data gleaned from site search to enhance marketing programs throughout 2014. As they do, there will be more effective ways to propagate information to their consumers, suppliers, and alliance partners that will lead to better online shopping experiences, brand-building opportunities, and revenue generation.

Tim Callan is the CMO of SLI Systems.

According to Crowdtap, partnered with Ipsos Media surveying 839 millennial men and women online, millennials reported spending roughly 18 hours of their day engaged with media, often viewing multiple devices simultaneously. Whether it’s called peer-created content, consumer content or user generated content (UGC), the research found that millennials spend 30% of their media consumption time with content that is created by their peers.

This exceeds television consumption and is rivaled only by the time spent with all traditional media types (TV, print, radio), a combined 33%. Millennials are also committed to engaging with social media on a daily basis above all other media types.

Millennials spend more time with User Generated Content than with TV

Millennials prioritize social networking above other media:

Given millennials’ advertising savvy and skepticism around media, it is important to deliver a message through trusted sources, says the report. Millennials report that information they receive through UGC is highly trustworthy and trusted 40% more than information they get from traditional media sources (TV, print & radio), including newspapers and magazines.

Specifically, conversations with friends and family are the most trusted UGC format, followed by peer reviews. Conversations with friends and family are trusted 2:1 over TV and radio and almost 4:1 over banner ads. Brands looking for consumers to trust their marketing can no longer rely on tradi­tional media to communicate their messages to consumers. In today’s landscape, it’s peer-created content, or “consumer to consumer marketing,” that drives trust.

The correlation between trust and influence is revealed in the 2013 Annual Edelman Trust Barometer Study, says the report, which finds that trust leads to influence. The more trusted the source of a message, the more likely it will have a positive impact.

With 18 hours of media consumption a day, across multiple screens, with channel flipping, tabbing and page turning, it’s a wonder anything stands out and makes a lasting impression, notes the report. Marketers rely on creative to break through the clutter, but often it’s a combination of creative and the right delivery channel. For millennials, user generated content is more memorable than non-user gener­ated content, with peer-created content, including conversations with friends/family and peer reviews standing out the most.

UGC uniquely provides marketers greater access to millennials’ time, a trusted channel to deliver brand messages and a memorable experience. The combination to deliver all three makes UGC more influential on millennials’ product choices and purchase decisions than traditional media.

Percent of millennials who say media type has influence on purchase decision:

• User Generated Content   53%
• Traditional Media   44%
• Banner Ads   23%

Concluding, the report says that professional influencers have the reach and resources to create and share quality content. Consumer influencers have personal relationships that enable their recommendations to carry weight. Together, this combination can drive both reach and powerful influence. As brands continue to aggregate types of influencers and refine their strengths, these programs will likely become a fundamental component of most marketing strategies.

By Jack Loechner,
Center for media Research

As I prepare for our Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, and Sydney workshop tour in March, I can't help but think about how few of my U.S. and Western digital marketing peers know about China and APAC in general. And I think about how much I've learned beyond the anecdotal cultural experiences, like the everyday Chinese "looggeey" spit fest or 100-year-old egg cuisine, the two-handed business card introductory bow, and my subtle but important favorite, the homogeneity of an Eastern society (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) in understanding the world is not about self but the communal good (ahem, Gen Y'ers).

No, let's talk about digital and how far ahead Asia is in so many respects and how we can all better apply it, especially all those Westerners setting into their 300-meter flats in Hong Kong or Shanghai looking to build the APAC presence for their companies.

First, let's get history straight. The Western world, for nearly all of civilized man, save the opium-induced decades of darkness, has been woefully behind Eastern society. This is happening in digital, mobile, and social, too.

• Take the Terracotta Warriors, where we learned that China had steel melding and modern metal-tipped arrows nearly 1,000 years before us.
• Or China's first emperor commanding an army 10 times the size of the largest army Rome ever assembled.
• And of course the bit more trite observation of who created the pasta noodle first.

• Beyond the "Like": Social Media Tracking, Testing & Targeting
• The Marriage of Social Media & PR: Making it Work for Your Brand

Last week, I started working for Wikimotive as a social media rep. It’s my job to maintain a dealer’s social media presence by creating great content that gets users interacting, and maintain that interaction in order to build a connection.

The automotive industry is new to me; my social media experience up to this point has been general content marketing, which is focused on generating page views and interactions, not necessarily business. The great thing about social media, though, is that my experience in content marketing easily relates to business, as the content I create and promote also generates page views and interactions — it’s simply fine-tuned for a local audience full of potential customers.

With that said, here are three valuable things I learned about automotive social media in 3 days:

1. Don’t Concern Yourself with Big Numbers

Coming from content marketing, bigger was always better. The goal is to drive as much traffic to a blog or piece of content as possible, as quick as possible, and move on.

With automotive marketing, the idea isn’t to necessarily stop worrying about stats and growth, but to realize that you’re not creating “viral” content that will appeal to millions of people all over the world. You’re focusing on an extremely niche market in which precise user targeting is everything. That doesn’t mean your content shouldn’t be appealing to millions, it simply means that ten views from local users is worth more than 10,000 from those living on the opposite side of the country.

If your marketing firm is posting big numbers from your various social media pages, ask them these questions:

1. Where is the majority of that traffic coming from?
2. Was the promoted content directly related to my business?
3. Are users showing interest in my inventory?