There is a reason that atomic physics or rocket science do not have any gurus. Werner von Braun was not a man of opinion and neither should you be when it comes to online marketing. The information is not subjective and is quite tangible.
Marketing has a ton of gurus and they’re all telling us the end is nigh. When a field has a lot of gurus it means that decision making is a matter of opinion and quite pseudo scientific. Stop listening to the wrecked hippies of old style marketing and measure what works by yourself. We even allow you to benchmark yourself and compare your way of doing it against your industry. Excluding a channel like banners because of pure ignorance or hearsay is simply put a symptom of a disease that plagues the online marketing industry: “Too many positions for too few educated people”.
If it works, it works. I have yet to see a company that has been able to only do Search marketing successfully, without excluding themselves from a potentially large chunk of market shares. Measure and decide. Stop being religious sheep.
Trying to evaluate your online marketing effort and performance on a periodical basis is healthy, unless it isn't done often enough. Evaluating a specific activity when it is already done, will only save your future budget and not adjust your current performance.
Far too many companies only review and adjust their online marketing activities in retrospect using historical data to plan ahead. Instead we recommend that you identify poorly performing activities while they are running and change them on the fly. Why wait and waste money for an entire month or quarter when you can change creatives, text and placements on a minute to minute basis, as soon as you identify underperformance.
The key to this strategy is owning your own activities. Use a performance tool with a dedicated Adserving capability, integrated email functionality and direct APIs into search engine ad applications like Yahoo and Google.
Headlight can do all this for you, if you just dedicate yourself to react to the displayed performance. You need to incorporate the available technology into your existing online strategy. It is a simple as that.
