Relevance of "hosted interactions / events" in a slowdown.

Here is a very good and a crisp article on "face to face" customer events and their relevance in the current economic conditions. Focused events are a great way to ensure a good ROI for certain categories of products / brands.

There is however a need for caution. I am of the strong view that brands need to re-examine their exposure to events which are done purely from a brand awareness perspective. Some of these events have very limited and questionable ROI. More on that later in the next post.

"Events should be a critical component to converting your prospects into customers. Before launching one, however, you should rank and score your potential attendees based on several factors including: how close they are to purchasing, their individual purchase authorities, the size of their budgets and other technical and product factors unique to your market or industry.

Once leads are in your pipeline, a content-rich live happening is a great way to move them along the buying process." writes Gordon Plutsky. Read the full article here.

Changing Asias - the new blog.

Bates141 has launched a new blog which focusses on looking at the changes which are happening across Asias. Some good stuff here and more to come.

7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide

A very good article focused on B2B marketing and a must read. Please click here. Also read about "Intelligent Marketing in tough times" here.

Brower Capatibility Testing

In my recent talk with Rajesh Ghatge on the effectiveness of the online marketing programs, we discussed at length adherence (or lack of it) to the basic logic of pre-testing campaigns across browsers platforms before their deployment. The logic is very simple; however, it is often overlooked due to over dependency on IE as the default browser. Most marketers tend to disregard the campaign effectiveness on other browsers, due to their own usage patterns.

After our chat, I did spend a little time on looking at the back-end of my own blog (The BTL Life) to try and test the logic and was quite taken aback by the browser mix. This pie chart shows the distribution of the browsers used to visit this blog.

I was expecting a higher IE% (and not because I am an IE user), however, the site stats got collaborated by other 3^rd party browser stats, which are pointing towards a significant increase in the Fx users (42%) and now a 3% now on Chrome. Read more about Browser Stats here.

Pre-deployment testing across all browsers formats is now more critical than ever. It is basic yet critical. Also not to be overlooked are campaign’s compatibility / effectiveness on parameters like Java scripts versions, monitor resolution and colour depth – all these can make your great campaign look rather silly on certain machines. While global averages may not always be relevant to every online deployment as different campaigns would attract different audiences (and hence hardware and software type), however, it is important to address all browser formats and ensure cross-browser compliance. Thanks to a number of tools and sites, this is easy to ensure. One could use sites like www.browsershots.com which report on site compatibility across browsers.

Promo Trends Report 2008.

Do look at this latest Trends Survey done by the Promo Magazine. Great to see as much as 61% allocation towards consumer and trade promotion. This is a must read and it is a free download.