It’s a new year, and that means it’s the perfect time to identify the most impactful trends for your small business in the coming year.

What does 2009 have in store for your small business, and how should you revamp your marketing plans to leverage trends, capture market opportunities and maximize your revenue in 2009?

In response to these questions, the Website Marketing NOW team has developed the following list of Internet Marketing Trends for 2009, as part of a series of trend assessments for the new year. Enjoy, and thrive!

Internet Marketing Trends for 2009

#1: Internet Marketing Growth among Small Businesses
The recession is going to force many small businesses to rely more heavily on cost-effective marketing channels such as Internet marketing. Expect to see more email marketing, blogging, social media marketing, social networking and widgets, and expect to see more investment in websites and microsites. Make sure that you pump up your Internet marketing efforts in 2009 to compete effectively.

#2: Small Business Innovation
The recession is going to force small businesses to innovate. The down economy is going to mean fewer dollars to go around, and those that innovate will have the best opportunity to not only survive but to thrive. Cost-effective experimentation can be achieved online more easily than offline, and so you should aim to launch several innovative online campaigns during 2009 to move your business forward through the tough economic times.

#3: The Mobile Platform
The Apple iPhone is now the best-selling mobile phone in the US. Guess what? This means that the mobile platform and the opportunity to market to consumers via the mobile platform are finally here, and not just hype.

#4: Government
With the billions upon billions in bailout and recovery funds pouring into the economy from the government, expect the government’s role in the economy to increase in 2009. New government-funded projects mean opportunities to eliminate waste and to increase efficiency, and this is often served best by online solutions.

#5: The Graying of America
As the 78 million Baby Boomers age, we are experiencing a major surge in the number of seniors in the US. Many seniors are going to need special services. Many are going to be looking online for products and solutions rather than fighting the crowds, and this presents significant market opportunities for those companies able to connect online with this generation.

#6: User Generated Content
User generated content is here to stay. People trust advertising only a mere 14% of the time, whereas they trust recommendations of other consumers 78% of the time (Source: Universal McCann, 2008).

#7: Continuity
Instead of one-off solutions, companies are migrating towards a continuity model, as this provides a more reliable revenue stream. For example, ongoing computer back-up services, online education and subscription model businesses.

#8: ROI
With the recession, small businesses are going to be forced to focus on ROI (return on investment). This applies to both you as well as your clients. Make sure that you are tracking the ROI of your marketing campaigns to find the most effective mix. For B2B companies, helping your clients increase ROI in 2009 is going to be a critical ingredient in what you do.

#9: Google Sophistication
Google is becoming more and more sophisticated in identifying relevance. In 2009, expect spammers and black-hat practitioners to lose a lot of ground (thankfully!). To thrive on Google in the future, you will need to offer quality and utmost relevance. You will need to be a brand that others want to talk about.

#10: Rising CPC
As more small businesses discover the power of pay-per-click advertising on the search engines, you will find that the average cost-per-click for many industries will rise in 2009. This means that to maximize your results, you will need to implement an intelligent bidding strategy, and one not just based on high bids for better positioning.

#11: Verticalization
Expect verticalization to take shape online in 2009. For example, whereas Google and Yahoo! are for the masses, vertical engines are starting to appear. TheFind.com, a vertical product search engine focused on the fashion and lifestyle segment, went from 1 million monthly unique visitors at the beginning of 2008 to an estimated 10 times that number by year’s end.

#12: Personalization
The Website Marketing NOW team has written about the Personalization trend multiple times. We still see this as an area of growth in 2009, and we expect to see this trend grow among small businesses looking for an edge. Check out Zazzle.com, LuLu.com and Threadless.com as corporate examples, and Kiva.org as a nonprofit example.

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The Website Marketing NOW team would like to wish everyone a very Happy New Year! Best wishes for a successful, profitable and peaceful 2009.

Remember that with the new year, you are presented with OPPORTUNITY. Clarify your marketing goals, make a plan and then do everything you can to achieve them. May 2009 be your best year yet.

Happy New Year!!!

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Just in case you didn’t hear, we are in an economic recession. Scary times, right? It’s very tempting (and probably smart for many business owners) to hunker down, conserve cash, drastically cut budgets and even lay some people off.

Still, a recession is also an amazing opportunity. For what exactly, you ask?

It’s a great time for branding. Solidifying your brand during a downturn will make your company stronger. You see, when the economic tide turns around again (and history proves that it will), with the return of purchasing power, your product or service will be best positioned to sell.

During uncertain times, consumers experiment less with new products, and they spend less. People tend to shop smarter, too. This means they research, analyze and compare. For companies with a focused brand message, complete with clear value proposition and differentiation from competitors, there comes distinct advantage.

How to gain the advantage, you ask? Great question…

Here is a four-step plan to shore up your brand during a downturn, so that you’ll ready when that economic recovery comes along.

1. Brand Audit
First, you’ll need to determine where you stack up against your competition. An old-fashioned SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) of your brand v. competitors’ brands will provide insight into how well the mission of your company, product and/or service is communicated via the marketing, customer service and operations of your business. Be sure to carefully and honestly assess how well your brand communicates a distinct value proposition and differentiates you from your competition (a.k.a. positioning).

2. Brand Focus
Second, you’ll need to clearly communicate your core business. Given the outcome of your brand audit (see above #1), how can you better focus awareness of your core competency to both internal and external stakeholders? A focused brand is uncluttered, and should emphasize your relative strength(s). Reinforcing your differentiation also reinforces inherent value. Customers who continue to perceive a measurable difference may justify paying more for your product/service, even during a recession.

3. Brand Promise
It is especially important during a downturn to reinforce your “brand promise”, so that every aspect of the business is prepared and able to champion (and defend if necessary) market share. How does the sales function portray the performance of your product/service v. actual performance? What does your customer service function do to ensure stewardship (or rewards, even) of loyal patrons? And what does the “brand promise” do about dissatisfied customers?

4. Brand Communication
Smart marketing sets measurable objectives. Few marketing strategies are as quantifiable as online promotion, given the web analytics available. With its relative affordability, promoting your newly audited and focused brand via the Internet during the recession must be seriously considered. If your competitors cut their advertising budgets, the voice of your brand will be louder. With clever use of online marketing tools such as social media, SEO, pay-per-click campaigns and video promotion, there is significant opportunity for gaining market share.

And yet, you still may have doubts. If you’re thinking that an economic recession may NOT be the right time to focus on your brand, we leave you with some additional anecdotal (and some statistical) food for thought:

* Proctor and Gamble successfully marketed Ivory Soap during the Great Depression.
* Intel initiated the campaign "Intel Inside” during the 1990-1991 recession.
* Wal-Mart launched its "Every Day Low Prices" campaign in 2000-2001.
* In a recent survey by MarketingProfs (www.marketingprofs.com) of 600 marketing professionals, 60% of respondents indicated they are increasing their online budgets.

This is a guest blog entry by Keely A. Bamberg, owner of StrateGente, a consulting firm specializing in high-priority, time-sensitive business analysis, market research and strategic marketing projects for growing businesses and non-profits.

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Microsoft adCenter released results this week of its online survey of small businesses. Although the majority of small businesses have a website presence, the lack of paid search marketing campaigns among these companies is extremely surprising, if not shocking.

The survey included 400 small-business owners in the US, with findings that 59 percent of small businesses with websites do not use paid search marketing, and of those, 90 percent have never even attempted it. Remarkably, if not laughably, a full 73 percent would prefer to do taxes rather than attempt to start a search marketing plan.

How can this possibly be? Why are so many small business owners terrified of search marketing?

The Microsoft website lists a number of reasons for the cautious attitude, including:

* Nearly nine in 10 (89 percent) feared keywords may become too expensive.
* Eighty-one percent questioned if paid search marketing is the best use of their marketing budgets.
* One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex.

Website Marketing NOW strongly recommends that small businesses implement a multifaceted marketing plan. As part of that, small businesses should at the very least test the viability and profitability of a paid search marketing campaign as part of their overall marketing mix. Paid search marketing offers the small business a number of benefits, including the ease and immediacy of launching a campaign, the tracking of granular campaign results and the ability to test/refine/re-launch continuously based on ongoing results.

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When companies look to improve results of their website, often they first think of redesigning the site.

However, there are many less extensive, more targeted approaches to increasing website results. One aspect of websites that is usually overlooked is the online form. However, this is a customer engagement page. It is a customer conversion page. It is a prime opportunity for your business to increase its lead-generation and/or sales rates.

And testing changes to your online forms is much easier, faster and less costly than attempting to redesign your entire site. Therefore, it is much easier to achieve a positive ROI on your investment.

With the above in mind, Website Marketing NOW is providing you with the following Top 10 Tips for improving your online form results:

*Top 10 Tips*

Highlight the Benefits!
What’s in it for the prospective customer? Make the benefits of form submission absolutely clear to site visitors. This is the single most overlooked aspect of online forms, and easily fixed.

Keep it Simple!
Keep your form brief and to the point. Remove all unnecessary fields. The fewer fields, the higher your conversion rate.

Clarify Your Privacy Policy
Build trust by including a link to your privacy policy. Test the placement of the link above and below your online form.

Trust Elements
Build trust by including "trustmarks," such as those by the Better Business Bureau, McAfee, Verisign, etc.

Provide Context
If you have multiple online forms within your website, with a small amount of text clarify the purpose of each form just above it. This ensures that the right submission gets into the right hands in the shortest amount of time.

Clarify Required Fields
If certain fields are required for submission, make that clear.

Clear the "Clear" Button
It’s too easy to accidentally clear one’s data. Remove this obstacle to conversion.

Allow Feedback
Regardless of how many pre-defined fields you have, empower your prospective customers to provide free-form feedback.

Progress Indicator
For online forms that span multiple pages, include a progress indicator so that prospective customers know exactly where they are in the process.

Strong Calls to Action
Include clear and strong Calls to Action in line with the context of the form. For example, "Download Now."

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More domain name fun today. In our earlier post What’s In a (Domain) Name?, we listed different options for exploring domain names, purchasing domain names and making anonymous certified offers for domain names.

Once you have your main domain name, though, you should take your domain strategy to the next level. To that end, there are various tactics that you should implement. We’ll look at one of these tactics today, and then address additional tactics in future posts.

Start with the basics. Protect the integrity of your brand and prevent your prospective customers from getting scammed by taking the following action.

Misspell Your Domain Name!

"What’s that??," you say. Are we nuts?? Well, maybe, but this step is certainly not a nutty idea.

How many times have you typed a website address into a browser, but accidentally misspelled the domain name, either because you were working too quickly, you were guessing at the spelling, or otherwise? Probably more than a few times.

And what happened? Probably on several of those occasions, you were redirected to another company’s website. It’s possible that you were taken to a site made to resemble the site you intended to visit, in an attempt to capture your money fraudulently.

You should go on the offensive. Protect the integrity of your domain name. Figure out the most likely misspellings of your domain name that prospective customers are going to make (e.g., often people type "m" instead of "n", or vice versa).

For example, for the website MusicNation.com, potential misspellings might be MusicMation.com, MusicNatiom.com, MusicNationn.com, MusiccNation.com, etc.

Then, register these domain names. You can register as many as you think are relevant and will help to protect your brand integrity. That may be one very obvious misspelling, or 15 misspellings.

The next step is to redirect these misspelled domains to your main website. Implement a "301 Redirect" to signal a "permanent redirect." (Be sure that you do NOT duplicate the content on your main website in these misspelled domains.)

By following these simple steps, you will successfully defend your business against others who may be unscrupulously trying to leverage your brand equity. And you will be helping your prospective customers to achieve their intended objectives (regardless of how good or bad they are at spelling!).

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StartupNation.com, a leading online content and community resource for entrepreneurs, has published the 3rd of a series of articles by Website Marketing NOW to help entrepreneurs build successful small business websites. The new series is titled Crush the Competition. The four articles in the series are:

* The Value of Website Competitive Analysis
* Build Big Barriers
* Automate, Discombobulate, Strangulate
* Get Personal

The first series, Marketing Fundamentals for Website Success, was published in July 2008. The second series, Take Your Website to the Next Level, was published in September 2008.

Check out the articles! And while you’re on StartupNation.com, you should check out all the other extremely useful content they offer. The site is an invaluable resource for any entrepreneur.

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In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare famously wrote:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet…

Of course, Shakespeare never would have written that about domain names for websites. Actually, the name does matter and can have a major impact on the success of your business.

Domain Naming
Are you looking to start a new business? Then you are probably going to spend a lot of time researching, brainstorming and deciding on the most effective company name. As part of that process, be sure that the domain name of your business is available.

You don’t want to name your company "Inspirations" (for example) if the domain name and many similar variations are already taken, as that could lead to a lot of confusion on the part of people looking for you online. If those sites are similar to yours, then you’re in real trouble, as site visitors may not even realize that the site is not yours. Trust us, we’ve seen this happen, and naming a company in this way goes against common sense. Why is it that many entrepreneurs will spend countless hours dreaming up the perfect business name but won’t take the 30 seconds required to confirm if the domain name is available??

Choosing the Right Name
When you are naming your new company, you will have various tools available at your fingertips to ensure that you choose the right corresponding domain name. Whether the domain name is freely available or up for sale, you have options. And here are a few tools to get you started:

Ideas
Can’t figure out the best domain name for your business? Try the following tools, which provide you with domain name suggestions:

* DomainTools.com

* GoDaddy.com

* Nameboy.com

Check Availability
Do you know the domain name you want, and now need to confirm availability? The following sites allow you to check the availability of your desired domain name:

* NetworkSolutions.com

* GoDaddy.com

* 1and1.com

Check What’s for Sale
If the domain name you were interested in is already taken, you have several options. The following sites list domain names for sale. You can check to see if the domain name you had in mind is listed, and further to this you can explore alternative names that might catch your eye:

* SnapNames.com

* FabulousDomains.com

* Sedo.com

Check the Auctions
Can’t find a name that satisfies you? Perhaps an auction might be the place to find an interesting domain name that catches your eye. The following sites allow you to bid on domain names that are already registered but are available through a bidding auction:

* SnapNames.com

* Moniker.com

* Sedo.com

Make an Offer
If your desired domain name is already taken and you do not see if up for sale anywhere, then you have the option of approaching the domain owner with an offer to purchase the domain. The following site allows you to use a third-party service in making anonymous, instant, certified offers to these domain owners:

* Network Solutions

Conclusion
What’s in a name? According to Shakespeare, not much. What’s in a domain name? A LOT!

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In its December 2008 issue, Entrepreneur magazine has detailed its list of trends for the coming year in the feature article "2009 Trends to Watch".

Below, Website Marketing NOW examines each of the trends listed under the "Web" category from the article:

* Web Apps
We agree with the main premise presented by Entrepreneur, that there is a great deal of opportunity for new web apps and tools. The key for small businesses is to create web apps that are truly useful, and either help customers achieve their objectives or solve their problems.

* Mobile Apps
Mobile keeps getting hotter and hotter. Whereas countries like Japan have been used to high-powered cell phones for years, the US is now catching up and going mobile fast. Website Marketing NOW believes that the areas of greatest opportunity in the mobile apps space for 2009 belong to retail, restaurants, tickets, news & informational services, and financial services.

* Online Video
Online video has been hot for a while, but in 2009 Website Marketing NOW believes that small business websites should really do whatever they can to add relevant video to their websites. Video for video’s sake should be avoided, but those small businesses that are able to truly help their customers through online video should benefit. For those small businesses that do not add online video to their websites in 2009, they run the risk of being outmaneuvered by the competition.

* Blogging
Website Marketing NOW is a HUGE advocate of small business blogging. The benefits are countless. You can communicate directly with your customers and prospective customers. You can seek their feedback and engage with them. You can educate and prove your expertise. You can enhance the quality of your website. You can add content to your website that can be picked up by the search engines. There really is little reason for a small business to not have a blog in 2009.

* Web 2.0 Consulting
Many small businesses are having a hard time understanding Web 2.0 and how to get involved. Whenever there is confusion, there is an opportunity for consultants to help small businesses get things done. Website Marketing NOW cautions, though, that small businesses should not dive into Web 2.0 without a plan and a longer-term strategy for leveraging the efforts into actual business value.

Additional Trends

In addition, Website Marketing NOW identifies the following areas as small business web trends in 2009:

* Customer Voice
We see the customer voice as an important element in small business websites in 2009. This can take various forms, including customer video testimonials, customer reviews, and other types of customer-generated content.

* Personalization
Website Marketing NOW has written about Personalization multiple times in the past, including our post Website Trends: Personalization. We see this trend only intensifying in 2009, with many smaller businesses taking advantage of evolving technologies to offer a more individualized product/service.

* Verticalization
Up to now, we have seen many Web 2.0 sites gain popularity such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. These are generic sites geared to the masses. In 2009, look for more verticalization in this area. For example, social media and social networking sites that focus on specific industries and topics will become more prevalent.

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Looking to get a faster return on your website innovations and upgrades?

Try the following:

* Test Using Google AdWords & Website Optimizer
It is relatively easy to setup A/B split tests using Google AdWords to confirm which variations of your web pages work best. For more advanced multivariate testing of web pages, in which you can concurrently test multiple elements on the same web page, try Google’s Website Optimizer. Actively monitor what your target customers like and what they don’t like.

* Prototype Quickly
Keep your innovative new ideas big, but prototype quickly. Test prototypes that may not encompass 100% of your ultimate vision, but that will give you insight into your customers’ interests and preferences.

* Leverage Web Analytics
With any upgrades to your site, actively monitor and analyze the behavioral patterns of your site visitors. Your web analytics data is a potential goldmine of information about your customers. Remember, though, that the important thing here is to act on the data. Looking at the data without any corresponding changes to your website is a lost opportunity for potential business growth.

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