By Tom Polanski

I’m happy to report that eBrand Media clients and partners continue to realize significant revenue increases in 2008 despite downbeat messages about “economic challenges facing consumer’s as a result of higher gas prices, lower home values and a jittery stock market.” In my opinion, a tighter economy will potentially create greater profitability for online retailers as more people look to the web for savings and convenience. These consumers will augment those who already use the internet as their first choice for commerce.

While we wait to see if I prove to be prophetic, it’s true that we may see the launch of an increasing number of e-businesses.  Therefore, it’s still critically important for e-tailers to doing everything possible to nurture a long term relationship with their customers in addition to providing a positive shopping experience. They must be customer-centric. The effort put into quality products and services along with platinum level customer service while expertly managing relationships will result in increased brand loyalty, enhanced brand equity, multiple conversions and a life time value that will monetize the effort put into those relationships.  

In addition, more than ever, successful online marketers will have to be true professionals. The “cherry-picking” days are over. And that excites me. Too often we, as an agency, have had to spend considerable time earning the trust of advertisers who’ve suffered because some “web slinger” sold that company on a marketing campaign that had little or no chance of actualizing success. More often than not the objective seems to have been to close a deal rather than starting and developing relationships. With many agencies and marketing companies the thinking appears to have been that there will always be plenty of companies to burn and churn through. Everyone was rolling in dough. That won’t be the case much longer, I’m afraid, even though the web community should continue to well.

There’ll continue to be a lot of talk about and experimentation with social and mobile media, behavioral targeting, retargeting among other types of hard to quantify approaches to marketing but at the end of the day, whether you represent Ford or Mom and Pop, the prevailing question will be even more so than ever; does it back into a targeted CPA? Those agencies that know how to successfully buy and manage media into mandated performance metrics should continue to prosper in 2008. This task will require true marketing mavens and advertising adepts. 

I suspect that from here on in, rather than expecting to find another advertiser down the road to sell, the focus will be on developing long term relationships just as it always should have been. Quality business relationships evolve on multiple successes with minimal pain in between. It will be critical for agencies to develop intelligent, quantifiable marketing plans that meet or beat the success standards of the advertiser. Yesterday’s abundant consciousness has been replaced by fear, real and imagined. It’s all too true that a pervasive feeling of scarcity affects everyone including senior managers at major companies. In a down economy most businesses are more hesitant to make a change even if their current agency is only “doing okay”.

Marketers who are prepared, mindful of relationships, diligent and savvy will flourish. The cyber-sloth’s who grabbed the low hanging fruit without a thought about tomorrow are destined to join real estate agents and mortgage brokers on the sidelines thinking about what it was like. 

If you’re a lean and mean marketing machine based on a client-centric model, I salute you! You’re going to have a great year grabbing market share from the marketers who acted like the easy times would never end.