Friday Keynote Panel
Online Practitioners Share Their Secrets and Tactics for 2009

Best Practice: Carefully study your search engine traffic for keywords, long tails, and set up your site to maximize your search traffic to your site. Align the two to boost your results instantly.

Find ways to nurture your leads online, tie them to your website and keep them engaged.

Experiment with your brand online, try video podcasts giving advice around your products and services, keep them short and keep production values as high as you can. Try T-shirts so folks can express their love for you, candy heart generator for your company, etc. Blog items to post and redirect back to your site.

Be open to new ideas to leverage yourself for the upswing in the economy that will come. Do a better job of reaching our audience online.

Closing a sale will be tougher this year, and will take longer. Build a longer relationship with more touch points, email and web, to cover the process.

Start to think about a "buying" cycle vs. "selling" cycle -- we need to nurture someone from interest party to engaged party to why they should buy to, finally, SELL.

Real bacon is king. Turkey bacon is a lame cousin. The panel and room agrees. It's cold and raining today in SD and it's only 9 a.m., so, bit of a slow start to the day.

Find ways to widen the funnel and work on the ready to buys, as opposed to just the readies.

Marketing and sales activities need to be tighter-linked, inform sales of click behavior, leverage activity with trade show and email campaigns, use behavior-driven activities to identify those who are better leads and give them more opportunities to lead them to a sales conversation.

Time is tight, use social media/Twitter/etc. to engage them in near real-time where they are to answer questions, be present in customer's online life streams, and don't pray that they respond to an email or read a long webpage. Be with them where they are to close more interest into trials and sales.

Personality is important in marketing -- what's your company's personality, and how are you expressing it online, in print, in social networks, etc.

Need to work hard to allow people to choose what content they want in terms of permission-based email marketing, then deliver it.