With almost daily reminders in the media that the global economy is heading south, many companies are naturally looking for ways to tighten their belts. The marketing budget is usually one of the first victims in most cost-cutting exercises.

An Economist article – Perfecting Pitches – examines how some larger firms are likely to modify their marketing spend. One prediction is that advertisers will become more selective about the channels they use to communicate with customers, with firms likely to commit more resources to online initiatives.

Well-executed Internet advertising allows firms to easily address sharply-focussed market segments and its effectiveness can be far more accurately measured than mass-media campaigns. This is precisely why small businesses, which cannot match the Olympics-sized marketing budgets of the likes of Coca-Cola anyway, should also place the Internet at the heart of their marketing efforts.

Another interesting article – Are Olympics Sponsorships Worth It? – from BusinessWeek reports that many long-time sponsors of the Olympics are re-examining their marketing strategies amid research that suggests few consumers even notice who is backing the Games. Clearly the golden age of intrusion marketing is over. Marketers will have to find more targeted and personalized methods of leveraging on the Olympic spirit going forward.

Market research firm Frost & Sullivan expects to see robust growth in Singapore’s online content market over the next 5 years. Worth over SGD 30-million in 2008, it is expected to grow to over SGD 165-miilion by 2013.

Online gaming dominates the local content market now. Other content services include online music and videos. However, it is online gaming that has taken off significantly here, driven by the popularity of community focussed MMOGs (massively multi-player online games).

Singapore’s planned next-generation National Broadband Network will certainly give the online content market a fillip by making it more feasible to provide bandwidth intensive services such as Video-on-Demand.

However, I personally feel that it is the new mobile devices coming onto the market that will really boost the market. Apple’s iPhone has shown how a truly mobile device can effectively tap into the Web. Some of the 1st-generation applications on its fledgling App Store already demonstrate how ubiquitous, always-on connection to the Internet can be genuinely useful.

Most of the successful mobile apps do not require massive bandwidth or production infrastructure . Instead, the critical factors are to have relevant content and to present it intuitively through well designed user interfaces. Providing such relevant, localized & niche content is a field where you don’t really need to be big to succeed. So, I do expect that small businesses can take a big bite of the SGD 165-miilion online content market come 2013.

Networking Together – an WSJ Online article – describes how the rapid growth of social networking sites is giving small businesses an invaluable opportunity to dramatically expand their reach.

Small businesses, being more nimble and usually more approachable, are apparently better positioned to take advantage of the social networking phenomenon than larger companies. However, it does take some effort and planning to successfully leverage this medium.

The trick is to create a web presence that is compelling enough for your target audience to visit regularly and, crucially, for members to start contributing content to.

… and it’s getting local and becoming mobile.

A survey by WebVisible and Nielsen/NetRatings found that most consumers are becoming increasingly de-tuned from traditional advertising media and are instead relying on search engines and other online sources to find products and services from local businesses.

A majority of consumers apparently associate the trustworthiness of a business with the quality of its website. User-generated reviews, local news sites and social networks are other key influencers of consumer perceptions.

Consumers are also starting to use web-enabled mobile devices to access location- and time- specific product information. Such mobile access looks set to become an important driver for local commerce.

This particular survey was conducted in the USA, but a similar survey in Singapore would likely reveal similar trends. Anecdotal reports from many of our own small business contacts echo the increasingly important role that a strong web presence plays in a firm’s marketing effort.

Click here to download the full WebVisible report from GetEntrepreneurial.com (2.11MB PDF).

Just came across a useful free report from Schneider PR listing some of the key ingredients for a successful business-to-business (B2B) product or service launch.

Based on their survey results, the top ten success factors are:

1. Create a documented launch process.

2. Set a separate launch budget and make sure
it is adequate to meet the launch challenges
you face.

3. Establish your launch budget as early in the
product development phase as possible.

4. Keep your launch budget stable
throughout the implementation phase.

5. Determine your launch performance
measures before the launch begins.

6. Measure the “right” success metrics.

7. Include the “right” external launch
professionals on your team.

8. Fight for bigger budgets.

9. Educate your sales force and other internal
audiences about your new product or
service. Also focus on distributor, retailer or
dealer education.

10. Spend money on word-of-mouth campaigns
rather than on advertising.

That last point is particularly pertinent to small businesses – instead of blowing your limited budget on generic, me-too advertising, you should instead concentrate on creating a “buzz” around your product in the right circles.

Used properly, web engagement tools likes blogs, wikis and forums are ideal for initiating such word-of-mouth campaigns. Indeed, a majority of the subjects in Scheider’s study listed their online campaigns as being far more critical to the success of their new product launches than advertising.

Click here to download a copy of Schneider’s B2B Launch Survey report.

Having designed and launched a few blogs for our small business clients, I’ve learned that for the blog to succeed, the designated blogger or bloggers must develop a sustainable blogging ‘workflow’.

The workflow details – or ‘blog blueprint’ – is naturally fairly unique to each blog, but they all begin with a similar general template. The first step is to clearly define the goals of the blog. Next, you need to establish a set of processes that help generate a steady flow of relevant topics and content for the blog. Finally, practices to effectively promote the blog to its targeted audience will also need to be established.

A recent post by Chris Brogan describes the mechanics of developing a sustainable blogging workflow in some detail – well worth a read for tips on how to improve your own blogging habits.

The web forum engages and builds a community of people fascinated by the minutiae of hiFi audio – and then converting them into repeat, life-long, customers becomes almost incidental.

Read the article Here.

The Jaben Network, a small store in the Adelphi, City Hall has long been an open secret in Singapore’s small HiFi portable audio community. It finally got some mainstream press attention with an article in the Straits Times on Tuesday, commenting on the way the tiny store had managed to build an international community using a wordpress blog and web forum. On such a small scale, traditonal retail chanels were out of the question, and with such a tiny target market – the headphones can cost thousands of dollars – Jaben saw that traditional broadcast marketing woud not work.

Visit the Jaben Forums here.

In other words, “Thous shalt make content king” – the final commandment in BusinessWeek’s 10 Commandments of Web Design.

BusinessWeek.com surveyed a range of top web design experts and compiled their insights into a list of 10 contemporary design commandments. Browsing through the list, it becomes apparent that any web master would do well by following three simple guidelines: keep it simple; focus on the content and get social.

A BusinessWeek article reports that LinkedIn successfully raised $53 million in additional funding from VCs. This effectively values the professional networking site at more than $1-billion.

LinkedIn is one of the few social sites that has figured out how to profit consistently from user-generated content. It is expected to generate $100-million in revenue this year and its user base is still growing aggressively. Compared to the other social sites, its average user is also older and richer.

LinkedIn expects to use the extra cash to develop new communication and collaboration tools for its members and to fund expansion into new markets in Europe and China. While its current membership base is heavily US-skewed, the site does already have a significant global footprint. Singapore-based members are estimated to number well over 50,000 – making LinkedIn a useful networking and research tool for smart local businesses.

In 2005, BusinessWeek ran a cover story predicting that the emerging phenomenon of blogging would have a significant impact businesses on communications. Three years on, the story “Blogs Will Change Your Business” remains one of the magazine’s most read articles online.

However, while blogs certainly have become an important medium, it is just one of the do-it yourself “communication multipliers” to have emerged on the internet since the article was published. Social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are have burst onto the scene as have a myriad of smaller social connectors and collaboration tools.

BusinessWeek thus felt compelled to update their story and review some of the Social Web developments they did not foresee in their original article. Beyond Blogs is well worth a read for an overview on how these emerging social media tools are having a very real impact on business processes today.