The most important success factor when deploying online marketing tactics is to make sure they’re optimized to meet your business objectives. To do that, you need to employ industry best practices. It was in search of these best practices that we recently went to California to complete one of the online world’s leading certification programs, put on by the renowned team at Marketing Experiments (www.marketingexperiments.com).

Guess what? We passed! That means we’re now certified to help you increase the conversions related to the full range of your Web tactics and translate that into measurable response (whether you’re trying to fill your prospecting pipeline, expand your online lists, or make sales).

To get a flavour of the depth of research available through Marketing Experiments, and the leading brands they work with, we suggest you visit their site at www.marketingexperiments.com. We know budgets are tight right now, but you’d be surprised at how cost-effective these tactics are. Consider this: the New York Times used the Marketing Experiments methodology to increase sale conversion by 1,052%. Seriously.

Podcasts (Web- and mp3-based audios) are becoming an ever more effective tool in the marketer’s arsenal.  There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon:

• A significant percentage of consumers prefer to consume audio as opposed to written information.

• Podcasts are more flexible - in other words, you can’t read a case study or a product info sheet in the car or while you’re going for a run.  I mean, you could try, but it is really not recommended.

• Podcasts cater to our multi-tasking lifestyles. I can pick up e-mail and listen to a podcast in the background and retain a surprising amount of information.

We have been using podcasts as marketing tools for our clients for the last 12 months, and now recommend that they become standard tools for both product and service marketing. The easier you make it for your prospective customers to give you their attention, the greater the chances they will make the transition from a prospect to a customer.

Speaking of “attention”, in the next few blog posts I will address a paradigm shift that is taking place in the marketing world in general and on the Web in particular. We began to notice this trend from our work with clients and speaking with some of the leading experts in the field.  Appreciating this seismic shift will forever change how you look at marketing.  Stay tuned.