In our continuing effort to remain ahead of the curve and expand our internet marketing techniques, Blue Water Media attended the Search Marketing Expo in New York (SMX East). After a quick train ride up the east coast, Ernest and I arrived in New York ready for a full schedule of informative workshops and networking opportunities.

Our schedule of marketing workshops covered a wide range of topics with progressive techniques and strategies that included:

• Internal Linking Tactics – This session took a look at how to leverage internal navigation and links to maximize your rankings in the search engines.
• Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing – In this session, we looked at what happens when you combine landing pages with multivariate testing tools – tools that let you change various elements of the page dynamically to see which tests better with people.

After working with CEO’s and business owners for over 10 years, I can say without reservation that one of the most consistent challenges facing my clients has been lead generation and new customer acquisition. You might remember the term Lifetime Customer Value (LVC) from Business School. LCV is an extremely useful piece of data. I’ll touch on three things in this article – what is LVC, how do I figure out my product or service LVC, and how can it help improve my bottom line?

Yes, wipe the sleep out of your eyes! Lifetime Customer Value can tell us a lot about where our business currently is, where we are going and more often than not, how to achieve forecasted growth and margins. So, what the heck is it? First off, you’ll need to calculate a product or service life cycle (how long a customer is likely to do business with your company) before we can get a handle on LCV. Let’s say you have a total of 500 customers and they typically tend to do business with your company for 2 years (life cycle). Over the course of those 2 years the company recorded a total net revenue 1.5 million.

Most marketing executives admit that their campaigns rely on far too much guesswork. Rapid change, mercurial markets, and the sheer number of factors to consider make it difficult to predict how many messages will hit their intended targets. Some companies, however, are looking to scientific techniques and methodologies to improve their accuracy and boost their bottom line.

“Boost Your Marketing ROI with Experimental Design,” published by Eric Almquist and Gordon Wyner in the October 2001 issue of the Harvard Business Review, discusses how statistical techniques long applied in other field can be adapted to predict how a marketing campaign will influence consumer behavior.

The practice of testing different forms of a marketing or advertising stimulus isn’t new. Direct marketers have long used simple techniques such as split mailings to compare how customers react to different prices or promotional offers. But traditional testing becomes expensive when evaluating more than a few alternatives. Since companies now use many more marketing channels and adjust prices, promotions, and advertising messages merely by editing an electronic file, they send out an enormous stream of “stimuli.”

An epidemic plagues far too many companies in our technology-driven age. To put it simply, the IT department is affecting critical decisions in departments such as marketing/sales.

When a company’s CEOs, marketing VPs, sales managers, and other crucial organizational “power brokers” turn to their IT departments for advice, they may get more than they bargained for. Because directors of sales and marketing many times perceive their tech-heads as gurus of all things digital, they unwittingly authorize them to make critical decisions about how the company is marketed online.

The knowledge gap between those who make decisions about marketing or sales and the company’s tech-heads allows the IT department to directly influence customer behavior. This has more to do with marketing and return on investment (ROI) than you might imagine. Knowing software, codes, protocols, and the plethora of bells and whistles that go along with them doesn’t qualify the IT department to create persuasive websites that sell a product or service. This is not the IT department’s fault, however; the marketing department should see the company’s website as another marketing avenue and should treat it as such.