It's Been a Long Time. By Vicky Brock Thursday, 5th November 2009

I don't know if you feel the same, but I have found the last 12 months a huge marketing challenge; mainly because of the ever increasing number of communication routes open to me and the time that must be invested to do each of these channels justice.

Like many of you I've been Twittering, blogging, connecting on Linked In, delivering face to face workshops and online Webinars, writing white papers, speaking at conferences and occasionally I still turn up on Facebook and Flickr.  And somewhere in that process this trusty newsletter got neglected.

There are now so many more places where it possible to engage with our customers and marketing audiences in a conversational, almost one to one fashion.  And while those channels may be significantly less costly than old world marketing channels like TV and press, they can certainly be costly in time.  Time to devise a strategy, time to build a presence, time to evaluate, time to participate and respond....  Time to come up for breath and start again.

So where do we find ourselves?  The clear divide between online and offline marketing no longer exists.  Virtual world contacts have converted into real world clients and real world partners and colleagues follow my progress online.  It still surprises me when I speak to people face to face, to find that they already know I just got back from Google HQ because they read my Linked In status update or follow me on Twitter.

As marketers we may talk to the same people in several different places and in several different ways.  Additionally, our target markets and customers become an ever more fragmented group - harder to reach perhaps, despite more ways to engage with them.  We reach out to many small sub-sets of our audiences, without ever necessarily really seeing the whole any more.

Nor can marketers hold on to the idea that they are in full control of their message or are still engaged in the old "one-to-many" marketing approach.  Our audiences are now fully participative in the marketing process and as marketers it is our turn to respond.

And, as a web analyst, one of questions that challenges me all the time is how do you measure that?  How do you decide where to invest money and even more importantly for the small business, how do you decide where to invest time? 

Just because it's getting more complicated, just because people are being influenced in multiple places - from paid search to Twitter - doesn't mean we shouldn't try to use the tools and data available to test and measure what affects our business.  To listen to our customers, whether through analytics data or freely offered feedback.

Vicky leads Highland Business Research's online analytics and insight services. She is a Board Director of the Web Analytics Association, Associate Lecturer in Web Analytics for the University of British Columbia and course director of Web Analytics and eMarketing UHI's Department of Continuing Professional Development. She regularly speak at conferences on web analytics and online research, with recent sessions including the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, the Research 2008 Conference, the Internet Marketing Conference, Eye For Travel Munich and ITB Berlin.

www.highlandbusinessresearch.com