There are lots of predictions for 2012, some more fantastic than others. Sure, there’s going to be change, but it needn’t be disastrous. Change, when you’re prepared for it, becomes opportunity.

So what kinds of changes in Online Marketing should you be preparing for?

Do a quick search for “online marketing trends in 2012″ and you’ll find plenty to read. Every marketer has their opinion, and they’re all offering prognostications in their particular areas of expertise: SEO, PPC, conversion, social media, or web analytics.

Those individual online marketing disciplines work best together: SEO and PPC put your message in front of searchers and motivated shoppers, conversion optimization turns those visitors into buyers, social media builds and maintains real relationships with those customers, and web analytics crunches the numbers and finds opportunities for data-driven improvement.

Where can you go for a qualified, single source presenting online marketing trends for 2012 from respected industry experts across all disciplines?

Right here.

We brought our faculty together here at Market Motive for a brainstorming session to talk about the trends online marketers should watch for in 2012. We brewed a pot of coffee, gathered around the conference table, freed up the white board, and each instructor offered up the top three trends they think you should know about during the coming year.

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How one online company is embracing the customer experience to instill confidence, improve conversions, generate referrals, and retain customers. Lately I've been studying some of the new models for promoting local businesses online ... daily deal websites in particular. I signed up for Groupon and Juice In The City deals and have been researching the types of businesses that promote through them. One offer on Juice In The City caught my eye. It's from a company called GoPhoto and… Continue reading

If you're a marketer working online, you know that consumers are distracted and have an ever diminishing attention span. When we're teaching companies how to market online we have to keep reminding them to reduce the amount of copy to bullet points, headlines and scannable text. Consumers simply don't read body copy anymore. On the other hand, those doing SEO will repeatedly hear that you need good copy in your pages so Googlebot knows what the page is talking about. So there lies the paradox: Googlebot is the only entity that can be bothered to read your carefully crafted copy, and even… Continue reading

From John Buckman, via Dave McClure (two people who know vastly more about startups than I do), let me recommend a pithy view of starting a company. Pretty much how ClickTracks got started:

http://www.slideshare.net/johnbuckman/employees-suck-presentation?type=powerpoint

Trust seals such as the ubiquitous Better Business Bureau or the online equivalents such as Hacker Safe are designed to put the consumer at ease when doing business with a stranger. A website displaying Hacker Safe should yield better conversion rates since the consumer has confidence their credit card data cannot be stolen by hackers.

In line with the recent focus on teaching best practices for testing, we recommended to a Market Motive subscriber that instead of assuming Hacker Safe improves conversion rates they actually test it. Subscribing to Hacker Safe is not cheap and it must be justified through ROI.… Continue reading

We all periodically receive emails from social apps requesting that we add a contact, confirm a contact is a convicted mass murderer, or that we trust a website to divulge the pecadilloes of everyone we know.

In the distant past we had only a few social media apps. Plaxo might have been the first business oriented one (am I wrong?) and LinkedIn got going eons ago. I'm a late adopter of such things, so I got into Facebook only about 6 months ago. Now it seems like a new social media app spams me every week.

During Webmaster World last week I had the opportunity to see what surely must be the best show in vegas : Blue Man Group. I've found other shows failed to meet the expectations I had. Not so in this case. The experience was moving and thought provoking.

The Blue Men are puzzled or indifferent to the physical world around them. They might be space aliens or time travelers. They might understand some of the world they see, and choose to remain above it, or they really don't grasp it at all. One can imagine a future in which human interaction… Continue reading

You can't beat a good cliché, especially when mangled.

Anyway, a Future Now survey of online retailers illustrates just how dire most online retail sites truly are. We all know it's true. They (we) could do so much better. Those that try just a little bit are held up as shining beacons of mediocrity.

Recommended reading if you run a retail site.…

My phone just rang and I took the call. A very effective sales guy offered me traffic. Every functioning neuron in my under-caffeinated brain fired with the instinctive response 'no no no!'. I resisted the urge to just hang up, because Dear Reader, part of my job is to listen to such pitches and sift through them on your behalf. Should I stumble upon a diamond, or anything else made of carbon, I'll be sure to let you know.

I may well be packed-to-the-gills with hubris, but why am I so sure that paying for traffic is always wrong?… Continue reading

Those that know me will recall I periodically rant about bone-headed features in software, especially web analytics tools. One of the things that really makes my blood boil is a funnel report. The user/analyst typically adores this report because it seems to focus all attention on the crucial problem of abandonment, ie I have a form on my website and 97% of people fail to fill out the form having arrived there.

Web analytics vendors in turn have designed their funnel reports to be incredibly pretty, and to highlight this abandonment in bright red with arrows showing the countless visitors who reached sight of the goal but jumped over the precipice instead, to be lost in the seas of competing sites like so many ecommerce lemmings. The WA vendors wisely realise that a demo of a funnel report creates a strong desire to purchase the product. All those abandoning visitors, and finally you get to see why!!! Sign me up!!!… Continue reading