Glenn Seaberg
Spyder Trap Online Marketing

Most respected industry reports predict increased online marketing spending in 2009.  Yet many marketers are reluctant to embrace this as readily as traditional marketing.  How could this be?

The answer is simple. Most people avoid that which confuses them. Maybe you’ve witnessed an online marketing guru say something like this:

“If you take a look at organic SEO and PPC, then vet them against your KPIs, you can easily see SEM as the thing to do. But don’t overlook title tags, meta tags, and alt tags, and even long-tail keywords or your SEO could be SOL.”

WTF?

As online marketing professionals, our job is to explain why online marketing is worth the investment, even at the expense of traditional media budget – especially in this economy. Therefore, we shouldn’t speak in jargon and TLAs.* We need to clearly explain the unique features and business benefits of this new marketing frontier; efficient targeting, ease of testing, instant trackability and real-time analysis & correction (among others). These are the concepts that all marketers understand and embrace.

After all, the real benefit of online marketing is increased ROI. And that’s the only acronym that matters to the decision makers, whether they are VPs, CMOs or CEOs.

* TLA = Three-Letter Acronym
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For a cheat sheet of online marketing jargon, watch for my next post “The Unfortunate Glossary of Online Marketing.”