Late Web Marketing?

A recent survey of 120 senior marketing executives found that getting Internet marketing campaigns launched on time isn't an easy thing to do. That's not surprising to me, because ours are as well - and we have the tools and skills in-house! It's so popular that there are not enough resources to execute all the campaigns that are required. Yet most companies do not spend enough time or money to move these forward. Talk about Catch-22.

While 59% of the the marketers agree that Internet marketing is critical to their strategies, only 30% of planned campaigns launched on time. Major reasons included slow internal approval processes, web content management systems, and backlogs in the I.T. department (go figure). And only 17% found that the process of updating their website 'quick and easy'.

More importantly, the negative impact was that new business inquiries were down as well as customer satisfaction. Other impact was as follows:
- 35% said the delay impacted their web marketing
- 30% said this impacted brand image
- 20% said employee satisfaction was affected.

“As the Web picks up speed daily, there are internal forces at work that are slowing it down,” said Erik Aeyelts Averink, president, Products & Solutions for SDL Tridion, who commissioned the research.

Clearly, the web as a marketing tool is becoming more and more important each day. But web marketing requires skills, approvals and tools that are not firmly in place at most organizations. We know that at FoundPages and ActiveConversion, because we deal with it all the time. A large portion of our time is just getting things approved and put onto a website, or to decide on content for an email campaign. So much our time is just project management to get things moving.

I'm particular interested in the fact that 59% say that web or online marketing is 'critical'. 5 years ago, this number would have been below 5%. It's over 10x more important today. Online marketing is not a 'nice to have' anymore. It's essential to every business, and more importantly, available to every business today.

Don't leave your business without it! And don't let 'internal forces' keep you from getting it done.

Labels: late online marketing, project management, web marketing

posted by Fred @ 5:49 PM