The search Engine marketing (SEM) industry posted solid sequential and year-over-year growth in Q409 as marketers - especially in the retail category - capitalized on growing consumer demand and took a more aggressive position with their search campaign spend, according to the latest US Search...
From OPEN Forum: Recently, the administration has made a point of ardently encouraging banks to lend more freely to small businesses. This federal prodding makes it seem as though fundraising is the average small business owner's number one problem these days. In actuality, acquiring funds has just been ranked as one of the least of most small business owner's worries. Their biggest concern this past quarter? Sales.
According to the most recent NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, released in November, a survey of 11,000 small businesses asked participants to choose one of ten measures, including factors such as taxes, inflation, and government requirements and red tape, as their single most important problem right now. The results revealed that 33% of small business owners were most beleaguered by poor sales.
That is an all-time high for this specific measure, and the third highest percentage reported for any of the survey's ten measures over the past 35 years.
"Although a nice gesture, enhancing SBA lending programs will not help much -- too many owners have no reason to borrow," the NFIB report states. "In short, the demand for credit is in short supply and failing to understand the more major problems facing small business leads to bad policy.""What small business needs is customers," the report continues.Would you consider sales to be your greatest concern as you enter 2010?
http://www.businessinsider.com/1-headache-for-small-businesses-right-now-sales-2010-1
Want to get really rich? Go back in time and trade stocks with full knowledge of the future.
Well, you can't do that, but if you could, here's a guide.
Eddy Elfenbein over at Crossing Wall Street compiled the following list of top performing stocks since January 1st, 2000.
The criteria for the list was dead simple:
"Any stock traded on a US exchange that had a price of at least 50 cents on 12/31/99."
To have bet on these stocks ten years ago would have made you incredibly rich. So rich, in fact, that if you invested $10,000 in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters ten years ago, you'd have earned $789,540 - a 7,895.4% return on your investment.
So, whether you missed out or made the right calls...
We have lot of smart people at SAP, but we don’t have all of the smart people. We want to hear insights from others, especially from our customers and partners. Maybe a manufacturer in Mexico can help a chemical company in India apply some operational best practices or use their SAP software in a different way.
Within the SAP Community Network, members -- primarily SAP customers, partners, and consultants -- use a range of social media tools to engage with one another and to help shape SAP's future direction. They help us identify priorities and to define policies at SAP. They interact with product managers. And that highly networked level of interaction, in turn, benefits members looking to get the most from their SAP experience via the community.
Important to note is that some of our most-active and most-respected community members represented the larger community in making a series of requests, that SAP listened and was willing to be directed by this outside feedback, and that those community members affected SAP's offerings and policies.
People see user groups as a more cost-effective way to keep up to speed on technology.
(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Scott Olson is president of MindLink Marketing. He contributed this column to VentureBeat.)
The iPhone, Google search and Facebook were all latecomers to the game. None was first to market – but all of them are now the dominant players in their category.
In the business world, being a trend setter doesn’t guaranteed success. In fact, a great majority of those that blaze new paths fail. Yet entrepreneurs continue to chase – and be intimidated by – the mirage of first mover advantage.
Some see the chance to introduce a new technology or new category as an advantage – and figure “what can it hurt to be first?”
Plenty.
The race to be first to market causes many startups to work under an imaginary stopwatch. They accelerate their plans and, in the process, make mistakes. The symptoms of companies who put too much stock into launching a category are pretty common:
Even first-movers who find a modicum of success – or (the Holy Grail) an early rabid fan-base – are letting other companies learn from their mistakes. Look no further than Tivo – a company that arguably launched the DVR business, but whose position in the industry it created is fading fast.
So what can companies that aren’t first to move do to work themselves into a leadership position?
The rush to be first is a fool’s race. And being scared away from an existing market just because there are already established players is even more foolish. Timing isn’t everything. Understanding the needs of your customers and having a product that meet those needs is.
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Ryan started his talk by having us listening to an abstract from the Amelie soundtrack. He wanted the audience to close their eyes, and think about something nice.
He then went about his experience for running and being a great company. For him 8 conditions need to be met:
1 –Have a passionate leader (that is different concept from Charismatic), opinionated.
2 – Love your customers: meet them physically, no back talk, use your product everyday (so that you can experience the pain if required)
3 – Treat your team like royalty: good offices, be generous
4 – Give back to your community (it doesn’t have to be expensive): you can gather them once or twice a year and offer a meal, or training, or make a small event. Then you tweet and blog about it!
5 – Make a kick-ass product
6 – Invest in good designer –This adds credibility, and the company pride. It isn’t difficlt, just hire a designer. (I was surprised by the number of team in the conference who didn’t have designers, and asked “how can you get good design?”)
7 – Be more creative than what you need to be – spending one week away and do different stuff. It will pay off, and sometimes produce nice tools. As yu do so, take footage, and use it too.
8 – Get good at publicity. Tips from Kevin Rose, provide “invite only” beta (so that people talk about it more) and talk to junior bloggers so that they can write for you (junior because they have time, and need you too)
Carson, then explained that you cannot be great if you miss a single one of these 8 points… and it is important to be great, so that it is cheaper to recruit, you will have lower marketing cost in the long run, and because it is simply valuable for your staff and customers!
The call-measurement provider said that advertisers in the “Attorneys,” “Credit & Debt Counseling” and “Dentists” categories demonstrated the highest growth of pay-for-performance advertising adoption.
According to Telmetrics, pay-per-call is growing for the following reasons:
“Marketers in today’s challenging advertising environment - regardless of size - are demanding performance metrics from their advertising partners,” said Bill Dinan, president of Telmetrics. “Advertisers want accountability for their reduced budgets while providers want new sources of revenue. The pay-for-performance model, specifically pay-per- call, delivers both.”
Telmetrics also released call tracking data showing monthly call volume and duration for various traditional and online media, which the firm said is indicative of pay-per-call advertising’s potential across the board:
“Looking ahead, we expect to see continued growth in advertising accountability across all media,” added Dinan. “Advertising providers recognize the power of the performance-based model as it adds transparency to a traditional subscription-based advertising program and provides new monetization opportunities.”
Yellow Pages Must Evolve
Telmetrics also added that as the market changes, it will be key for Yellow Pages publishers, in particular, to adopt such a pay-per-call pricing structure and move away from traditional subscription-based fees.
“The Yellow Pages isn’t dead but it must adapt to the changing media environment to survive,” Dinan said. Citing the call tracking data, he added that traditional media are still producing high quality leads. However, those conversions often are not monetized.
In support of these findings, recent research from the ANA and Marketing Management Analyticsshowed that the recession is forcing marketers across the board to assign more focus to accountability and measurement in their marketing programs.
Similarly, the Institute for Public Relations found that even public relations - which has typically enjoyed a relatively low level of ROI accountability compared with other marketing tactics - is receiving more scrutiny in the measurement department.
As ad budgets shrink and pressure intensifies to show marketing ROI, US advertisers continue to express interest performance-based advertising, according to Telmetrics, which predicts that pay-per-call models are poised to experience explosive growth in 2010.
According to Telmetrics the top pay-per call-trends for 2010:
1. Agencies buy ads and bill per call: With a growing variety of media options available, advertisers will continue to challenge agency media plans and demand more pay-for-performance ad models. In 2010, agencies will buy ads via subscription and will bill back to customers on a pay-per-call basis.
2. Online media continue to adopt pay per call: Recognizing that calls are a cross-media metric and a metric that small advertisers quickly understand, digital players will continue to add pay per call to complement existing pay-per-click campaigns.
3. Quality of calls closely evaluated: As pay-per-call moves from infancy to mainstream, advertisers will want a more clear definition of call quality. Publishers and agencies will have to carefully consider what defines a billable call and will evaluate a call duration by media type and category while looking at repeat callers over variable time intervals. Also, there will be a continued emphasis on call recording for assessing leads.
4. No shift to pay-per-conversion: Pay-per-conversion - in which advertisers only pay for advertising if a sale is completed - will not take off this year, Telmetrics said. While calls make it easier to track conversions, the model presents too much risk for publishers and agencies as it relies on advertisers to convert calls to sales after the lead has been delivered.
“We see major growth for the pay-per-call model in 2010 because it offers important campaign performance visibility and gives advertising brokers - publishers, agencies, SEM resellers and others - another opportunity to monetize the leads their medium delivers,” said Bill Dinan, president, Telmetrics. “Also, pay per call presents a good way to ease smaller advertisers into digital media offering qualified and high-value phone leads with very little risk.”
September research from Telmetrics found that the number of local search pay-per-call advertising programs the company monitors tripled from January 2009 to June 2009, a sign, the firm said, that the recession is causing advertisers with reduced budgets to better track conversions and pay more attention to how traditional media are delivering results.
