With the quantitative portion of the program complete, we move on to the fun stuff: open-ended responses to the following question: Want to add your $.02 about any aspect of online marketing? Here’s the place to do so! The envelope, please:

• It all depends on what your goals are. Brand awareness has very different needs/requirements than direct response. Internet advertising can do both and is measurable in a way that is ultimately more satisfying and real than some offline marketing techniques (television/radio).
  
• Anyone can sell anything; but, to keep the sale – and the client – what you have to sell has to have value, content and integrity.
• Tough to choose just three techniques as an across-the-board approach. Every client and every piece of communication is different and requires different delivery tactics. The beauty of the ‘net is that it’s not a shoebox like traditional media. Listing techniques as “good” or “bad” without reference to the content and/or purpose of the message, the audience, etc., is an attempt to put it in that shoebox.
• In the B2B spectrum, education remains the key to gaining success with online marketing.
• As always, I loathe email campaigns. There’s no quicker way to assure you won’t get my business than to email me asking for my business.
  
• Wish there’d been some options in the survey about the power of online communities for marketing purposes, and I don’t mean viral.
• You have missed (or at least not made clear enough) the area that I have had the most success – B2B communities and portals. Those sites that are actually providing news and content and manage to develop a loyalty from a membership. This has been by far the most successful way for me to spend budget, although free techniques such as SEO etc. have also had a large part to play
• Marketers need to be more open to new avenues of interactive marketing.
  
• It works!
• It’s quite confusing. Who the hell has any idea what works?
  
• We’ve got a long way to go, baby.
  

The comments about community are, I think, right on target. For comparison purposes, I wanted to keep exactly the same questions this time around as last time, but clearly there is a lot of interest in (and success with) online communities.

I hope you found some of this information interesting, if not actually useful. My thanks to everyone who participated.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff.