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.

Back in July, I conducted an online marketing survey among the advertising and marketing professionals over on the AdRants forum at Soflow. I was interested to see whether ideas about online marketing had changed in the eight months since then, so I presented the same survey to the same audience. Sixty professionals responded back then, 55 responded this time. The results, as before, incorporate a margin of error of plus or minus 100% and are as follows:

You’ve been professionally involved in marketing / advertising for how many years?
Mean: 12.6 / Median: 12 / Mode: 12
(Six respondents have experience of 25 years or more.)

You’ve been professionally involved in online marketing for how many years?
Mean: 4.4 / Median: 5 / Mode: 2 and “more than 10” (tie)
(Eight respondents claimed more than 10 years each, up from two last time. Resume padding? Or maybe it just feels like more than 10 years!)

What online marketing tactics have you personally set up and implemented? (Do not choose tactics that you’ve had others implement for you.)
73.3% Email Marketing (html)
66.7% Email Marketing (text)
62.2% Banner Ads
62.2% Search Engine Keyword Ads
51.1% Email Newsletter Ads
44.4% SEO Techniques
42.2% Blog Writing
37.8% Affiliate Marketing
35.6% Ad Network Campaigns
31.1% Viral Campaigns
31.1% Rich Media Ads
31.1% Search Engine Banner Ads
28.9% Third-Party Email Lists
28.9% Optimized Press Releases
22.2% Blog Ads
15.6% Online Sweepstakes
15.6% Online Coupons
(HTML email marketing overtook text email in the number-one spot. The number of people using blog ads, previously the lowest percentage on the list, has nearly doubled over eight months ago, while the use of online sweepstakes has dropped to less than half of what it was.)

If you had limited resources for online marketing, where would you focus those resources? (Respondents were asked to choose only three.)
50.0% SEO Techniques
47.6% Email Marketing (html)
47.6% Search Engine Keyword Ads
28.6% Viral Campaigns
28.6% Blog Writing
19.0% Affiliate Marketing
16.7% Optimized Press Releases
14.3% Blog Ads
14.3% Email Marketing (text)
9.5% Email Newsletter Ads
9.5% Online Coupons
7.1% Rich Media Ads
4.8% Online Sweepstakes
2.4% Banner Ads
2.4% Search Engine Banner Ads
2.4% Third-Party Email Lists
0.0% Ad Network Campaigns
(SEO techniques, which was 34% in this category last time, overtook search engine keyword advertising in the top spot. A reflection of click fraud worries, perhaps? The desire to use html email marketing rose signifcantly, from 29.8% last time. Percentages aside, the top-three mix of techniques for limited budgets remains the same: SEO, html email, and keywords.)

If you had unlimited resources for online marketing, which tactics would you still avoid? (Respondents were asked to choose only three.)
60.0% Third Party Email Lists
32.5% Online Sweepstakes
22.5% Blog Ads
20.0% Banner Ads
20.0% Online Coupons
17.5% Search Engine Banner Ads
17.5% Search Engine Keyword Ads
15.0% Email Marketing (text)
15.0% Rich Media Ads
12.5% Ad Network Campaigns
10.0% Email Newsletter Ads
10.0% Affiliate Marketing
10.0% Optimized Press Releases
7.5% Blog Writing
7.5% SEO Techniques
7.5% Email Marketing (html)
5.0% Viral Campaigns
(Takeaway for marketers: Are you thinking about using third-party email lists? It may be worth a test, but don’t be too aggressive in this segment of your online marketing portfolio.)

Tune in tomorrow for the qualitative wisdom portion of our program: 12 professionals adding their open-ended $.02 worth about the topic of online marketing.