Looking forward to 2009, more than a quarter of recently surveyed small business owners plan to spend more on advertising, and another 60% plan to spend about the same as in 2008.

The Ad-ology Small Business Marketing Outlook survey found that small business owners are cautiously optimistic going into 2009. While 25% stated they are fearful about the current economic situation and 58% are concerned, 83% expect 2009 sales to be up or about the same as 2008.

When broken down by media type, over half of small business advertisers plan to spend the same or more on the following: Online advertising (69%), Yellow Pages (54%), newspapers (51%), and direct mail (51%).

“Small business owners rely on advertising sales reps for guidance and are clearly looking for consultative partners in the advertising process,” said C. Lee Smith, president and CEO of Ad-ology Research. “They are more likely to purchase advertising from those that understand their business,” Smith said.

Other key findings from the survey:

• “Knows my company/line of business” is the top attribute small business owners look for in a media advertising sales rep. “Delivers what they promise” is the second most desirable attribute.
• 52% of small business owners surveyed agree with the statement “you can gain market share by marketing while your competitors are cutting back.”
• 74% believe their company “must be one of the first 2-3 that come to a customer’s mind” when they need what the small business owner is selling.
• More than half of respondents plan to spend the same or more time and money on their Web sites and email marketing in 2009.
• The majority of small businesses are not using other emerging media: 77% do not use online video, 83% do not podcast, and 82% do not use mobile advertising.

With the dawning of the new year, I thought it would be helpful to analyze one of the best tools that any small business has at its disposal: pre-existing customers.  During a down economy it is critical to take advantage of your email list since your clients typically gravitate to vendors that they have purchased previously from.  By staying at the forefront of their mind you will be able to ensure that when they are in need of services, you will be the first company they call.

“More and more small businesses rely on email marketing as one of the cornerstones of their growth strategy,” said Luc Vezina, Campaigner’s head of marketing. “We hope these New Year’s resolutions inspire more small businesses to get started with email marketing and help those already using it to get even better results in 2009.”

1. Clean your email list – Maintaining a clean list is a challenge for businesses of all sizes, especially small business owners who often don’t have dedicated staff to handle such tasks. Take the challenge and make 2009 the year to start clean by scrubbing your list before sending your first campaign of the New Year. You’ll improve your email marketing performance, your reputation and deliverability rates. The first step is make sure your unsubscribe requests are up-to-date.

2. Review what worked and didn’t last year – Take a close look at your 2008 email marketing successes and failures so you can repeat the winning campaigns and cut the under performers. Refresh your 2009 campaigns by combining elements of your most successful email marketing tactics to get even better results.

3. Make a 2009 email marketing plan – We’re all working so hard and running so fast, many of us are accustomed to leaving our email marketing campaigns to the last minute. A great way to improve email marketing effectiveness is to look at the calendar through your customer’s eyes. Ask yourself what business and seasonal cycles are most relevant to your target audiences, then create an email marketing campaign calendar mapped to those cycles. Putting in a few hours to plan out your top campaigns for the year will ensure that your email marketing campaigns are timely and relevant – something your customers always appreciate.

4. Use customer data in email campaigns – Many small businesses today use CRM and lead generation systems that are filled with rich customer data that can be integrated with your email marketing service to dramatically improve campaign results. You can also build more targeted, segmented lists based on customer data. Even if you don’t use a CRM system, you can still segment your lists based on purchasing data. You can also conduct a quick poll through your email marketing service to gather more information from your customers that will help you improve the targeting, relevance and timeliness of your campaigns.

5. Try something new – Challenge yourself in 2009 by trying something new in your email marketing campaigns. Embed a video file or podcast in your next campaign. Adding multimedia can make your campaigns more interactive and engaging. If you haven’t used A/B testing to gauge response to your campaigns, give it a whirl in 2009. You’ll be amazed at what you learn about your customers and how you can use that information to improve results and drive sales. Setting up automated trigger campaigns can also improve the timeliness and relevance of your email marketing campaigns. It might sound too complicated or time intensive, but a good email marketing service should have the tools and technologies to make it easy for you.

Roost announced today that it has partnered with First American CoreLogic to add foreclosure listings from First American CoreLogic to Roost.com’s already database of homes for sale. This partnership offers real estate investors fast and easy access to information on more than 1.5 million foreclosed homes nationwide.

Roost.com is now showing foreclosures in an easy-to-understand, color-coded format. Users can instantly get shorthand information on each foreclosure property – street, size, bedrooms, etc. – as well as its foreclosure status, from just-announced foreclosure to auction, bank sale or reintroduction to the general real estate market. With this partnership, investors will now be able to view summary property-level foreclosure data with instant access to RealQuest, First American CoreLogic’s, online property record Web site, where detailed property-level reporting is available on 97 percent of all U.S. properties.

“We are excited to have Roost.com become one of our national data syndication distributors,” said Michael Maron, senior vice president of First American CoreLogic. “Roost.com offers a high quality consumer experience for home sale listings and a commitment to quality that is a core value of both of our companies. Roost’s superior search technology enables real estate investors and homebuyers to act on great property opportunities quickly and thoughtfully, especially during the current downturn in the real estate market,” added Maron.

“The upside of these challenging economic times is that real estate investors can help reinvigorate some markets, especially those hardest hit by the mortgage meltdown,” said Alex Chang, Roost chief executive officer. “Because we offer listings at every stage of the foreclosure process, real estate investors can jump on immediate opportunities, while homes that don’t sell right away or at auction will be reintroduced to the traditional market, giving everyday homebuyers a chance to purchase their dream home.”

Two-thirds of large U.S. companies believe they need to improve their analytical capabilities and only half believe they are spending enough on business analytics, according to findings of an Accenture survey released today. The survey of more than 250 executives is the basis of a report, “Competing Through Business Analytics,” which studied companies’ use of and investment in analytics to remain competitive.

While more than half (57 percent) of companies surveyed said they don’t have a beneficial, consistently updated enterprise-wide analytical capability, nearly three-quarters (72 percent) said they are working to increase their company’s business analytics usage.

“These findings show that business analytics prowess will be a high priority in the boardroom in 2009 and beyond,” said Royce Bell, chief executive officer of Accenture Information Management Services. “While executives understand that companies with enterprise-wide business analytics have an advantage over those still relying on nebulous sources to make decisions, they face institutional challenges to reforming their processes across the board. Leading organizations are moving from a siloed approach to more inclusive information management programs that work across the entire company.”

The survey also addressed the balance between using analytics and using judgment to make important business decisions, and found 60 percent of major decisions are based on analytics and 40 percent are not. The reasons executives cited most often as to why 40 percent of major decisions are based on judgment rather than business analytics were: because good data is not available (61 percent); there is no past data for the decisions and innovation they are addressing (61 percent); and their decisions rely on qualitative and subjective factors (55 percent).

The challenge to moving from “gut decisions” to employing data goes beyond just infrastructure investments. Large businesses also face a glaring human resources challenge, as 23 percent of respondents identified “insufficient quantitative skills in employees” as a main challenge to their company, and 36 percent said their company “faces a shortage of analytical talent.”

As if retailers did not have enough problems attracting consumers in a weak economic environment, a new research study from IHL Group says that retailers lose sales of at least one item to as many as 20% of consumers coming into their stores – leading many consumers to quit shopping with the retailer altogether.

Consumer Electronics stores are losing the most, with consumers saying that they leave the store without buying at least one item 21.2% of the time. Or put another way, these retailers are losing $1.35 for every customer that comes into their stores due to their level of out-of-stocks. Likewise, Warehouse Clubs lose $1.78 and Grocery stores lose $.68 in sales for every customer when consumers cannot buy that product or an adequate substitute.

“Retailers remain in denial when it comes to consumer’s perceptions of out-of-stocks,” says Greg Buzek, president of IHL Group, an analyst firm and consultancy that serves retailers and technology vendors. “Consumers don’t care why the product is not available. They come in with money to spend at the stores and have to leave either because the shelves are empty, there is no one to help get a locked item, or the staff simply cannot find the merchandise even though the computer system says they have it. Nine percent of all consumers in our study have simply stopped shopping at one or more retailers in the last 12 months due to the problem.”

Some key findings of the study include:

• Among Grocers, best in-stock performance is Safeway (14.7% of consumers experiencing out-of-stock of at least one item); worst are Food Lion and A&P (22.8%).
• For Home Improvement, the best performer is Ace Hardware (13.6%) which was slightly better than Lowe’s (14.1%). Worst performer in the category according to consumers is Menards, with 20.5% of their customers experiencing an out-of-stock of at least one item.
• For Consumer Electronics, Fry’s Electronics has the best in-stock position (13.1% percent of consumers experiencing out-of-stocks). OfficeMax is more than double this at 30.6%.
• Nearly one in 10 consumers of Sears/Kmart has stopped shopping their stores in the last year due to poor in-stock performance.
• Grocery customers leave stores not purchasing at least one item they planned to buy or a substitute product 16.6% of the time.
• Consumers aged 26-35 years of age experience out-of-stocks 11% more often than other age groups.

Know your thyself, know thy industry.  These are words to live by, and if you are in the mortgage or real estate industries, I’ve discovered some helpful research information for you this morning. iEmergent has issued specialized versions of its market data reports for lenders of all sizes who are interested in using affordable forecasting tools to improve performance.

By identifying lending opportunities within specific markets, these simplified forecasting reports enable lenders to increase loan capture efficiency to achieve sustainability and improved performance. iEmergent offers lenders the option to choose between one of two report types:

• Mortgage Opportunity Report - Detailed county-by-county forecasts and metrics covering purchase mortgage volume projections for 2009-2013. Each county is ranked by iEmergent’s eight different market behavior variables, such as the size, density and rate of growth of purchase lending opportunities.
• Mortgage Opportunity Totals Report - County-by-county projections for the total 2009 mortgage lending opportunity, including both purchase mortgage projections as well as a projection of refinance opportunity ranges. Interactive tool enables the user to adjust the national Purchase-Refinance Ratio to recalibrate the refinance lending opportunities in each market.

Home sales and prices will continue to fall next year and more people will try to sell their homes more cost effectively, according to 2009 predictions made by ForSaleByOwner.com, the nation’s leading by owner real estate website.  Based on trends among real estate consumers, it is also predicted that the Internet will continue to play a more prominent role in the selling and buying of homes, as real estate websites continue to make it easier to complete real estate transactions without paying expensive real estate commission fees.

“While 2008 will be remembered as perhaps the most painful year for real estate in decades, declines in home sales and prices will likely continue well into 2009,” said Greg Healy, Vice President of Operations at ForSaleByOwner.com. “As a result, we’re seeing new trends emerge that will affect both the industry and consumers who need to sell or buy a home.”

Healy continued, “Sellers facing lower home values will utilize the Internet and other alternatives to using an agent to avoid the expense of a real estate commission. On the buyer’s side, we expect that in 2009 the industry will reach a “tipping point” where — for the first time ever – more people will find the home they buy after seeing it on the Internet, rather than finding out about it from a real estate agent.”

“Finally, we believe the number of real estate agents and brokers will decline in 2009 and more real estate services will follow ForSaleByOwner.com’s lead in allowing sellers to advertise their home on Realtor.com without having to be on their local Multiple Listing Service,” added Healy.

Enduring companies survive because employees throughout the firm, not just those in the executive suite, learn to keep an eye on how related industries are evolving. As reported in a recent issue of Stanford Knowledgebase, longevity comes not just from matching the competition but also from recognizing fundamental changes in how the game is played and moving strategically to stay ahead.

“The main capability you really have to deal with these dynamics is the strategy-making process,” said Robert A. Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who coauthored with Andrew S. Grove, Stanford lecturer, a recent study in the Strategic Management Journal. “If the entrepreneurial activity has to be driven from the top, then the middle and senior executives are not doing their jobs.”

Business competition is generally highly dynamic but plays out in a linear fashion, says Burgelman. For instance, in some industries companies compete by giving rebates. Once a rebate is offered, rival firms quickly match it—but “the fundamental equilibrium remains.”

Grove and Burgelman focus on nonlinear strategic dynamics that change the normative, economic, technological, and/or cognitive “rules” that govern how an industry functions. In the rebate example, a firm may come up with a novel manufacturing strategy that offers high quality at lower costs, while the rest of the industry continues to compete by giving higher and higher rebates, a tactic that weakens their capacity to match the new strategy. These firms fall farther and farther behind, and eventually will be ground down, said Burgelman. “The player with the new strategy is going to get stronger and stronger.”

Middle managers and senior executives need two crucial sets of skills—conceptual and political—to help their companies handle nonlinear dynamics, Burgelman said. They must recognize the strategic changes in their industry, develop proposals to overcome the competition, and educate upper management about why the changes are crucial. That requires middle managers and senior executives to get support of at least some of their peers to be reasonably sure of having enough support to see the strategic change through.

The authors use their framework of nonlinear strategic dynamics to examine 37 years at Intel, where Grove served as president, chairman, and chief executive officer, and today is senior advisor to executive management. It focuses primarily on four events:

An industry shift turned dynamic random access memory (DRAM) products, Intel’s core business during the 1970s, into a commodity, making large-scale precision manufacturing competence the key to winning. Intel lacked that competence.

In four successive generations of product, Intel tried to use its competencies in integrated circuit design and process technology to innovate products and compete against the Japanese. The efforts increasingly failed, and Intel fell farther and farther behind—a nonlinear strategic dynamic. In late 1984 Intel top management decided to exit the DRAM business.

By this time frontline leaders at Intel had developed the first microprocessor, which found application in several high-margin market niches, while the DRAM had become a low-margin product. Although top management remained unclear for some time about which strategic direction to pursue, microprocessors won out in the internal Intel competition for scarce manufacturing resources. In the early 1980s IBM’s personal computers—a major application for microprocessors—rapidly grew to prominence and Intel top management became ready to shift its core business from DRAMs into PC microprocessors.

Top management’s decision to make this shift was facilitated by another nonlinear strategic dynamic that played to Intel’s (and Microsoft’s) advantage. While IBM had not insisted on exclusivity when adopting Intel’s microprocessor for the PC, it had insisted on Intel cross-licensing its technology to other suppliers. This required Intel to essentially give away its microprocessor designs to competitors.

Because of the broad access to the Intel microprocessors, independent software vendors increasingly wrote their applications based on the Intel architecture, increasing its value. PC users wanted to continue to use their old software on their new machines, fueling a virtuous circle for backward and forward compatibility. As Intel (and Microsoft) ultimately controlled compatibility, the company was able to radically change the game by insisting that it become the sole source provider of Intel microprocessors. Intel’s market share and profitability grew dramatically.

Strategic change does not always have such a positive effect on an industry. In the late 1980s the workstation market settled on using machines based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture that looked like it might migrate into the PC market segment. Even some within Intel were convinced that the RISC would eventually wipe out the complex instruction set computing system (CISC) that Intel used for its microprocessors. Through an autonomous strategic initiative of one young engineering manager, Intel also developed a RISC microprocessor. However, it became clear that new architecture would not be able to deliver on a 10X advantage over Intel’s CISC architecture. Intel’s leadership eventually decided that unless Intel itself pushed the new RISC it didn’t represent a paradigm shift after all and went back to what Grove called “vectoring everybody at Intel” behind the CISC architecture.

“Many times, these initiatives will not pan out,” Burgelman said, but it was still crucial for Intel to develop a RISC processor. If Intel had ignored it and RISC had won, Intel would have been at a huge competitive disadvantage.

Geographic diversity sometimes encourages autonomous strategic initiatives that may have nonlinear strategic effects. An Intel team in Israel designed and developed a new microprocessor—called Banias at the time—that demanded less energy and had easier-to-use wireless capability rather than emphasizing ever more “speed”—Intel’s typical performance focus. The Banias processor became a core building block of an innovative “mobility platform” called Centrino, now used in most laptop computers to allow users to be almost continuously connected to the Internet. Through Centrino, Intel was again able to set in motion a nonlinear strategic dynamic that gave it stronger and stronger market share and profitability in the fast-growing mobility market segment.

Having the team in Israel placed it far away from the faster-faster-faster mantra of Silicon Valley. “If the idea of trading off clock speed for die area had come up at headquarters,” Burgelman said, “it probably would have been killed right away.”

Another element crucial to maintain a company’s capacity to cope with and/or capitalize on potential nonlinear strategic change is often cold, hard cash. The authors point out that in spite of sharply declining revenue and profit during the technology slump of the early 2000s, Intel’s board of directors let top management keep enough cash reserves for one year of research and development and one generation of capital investments. That offered enough resources to fully pursue existing opportunities through heavy capital and technology investments, and a time buffer to decide on strategic direction.

According to the results of a new survey from SAS, companies that have better customer experience management capabilities, along with a strong customer orientation, enjoy a decisive competitive advantage.  Over 150 senior executives from leading U.S. corporations were polled to gauge their customer experience management capabilities in the first annual Customer Experience Maturity Monitor study. The results are now available by viewing an American Marketing Association Video Discussion “Multi-Channel Mayhem: Tapping the Customer Experience for Competitive Advantage”. Some key findings:

• Among companies reporting high customer-experience maturity, 81 percent reported outperforming their competition.
• Companies that reported outperforming competitors also reported higher future investment plans in customer experience capabilities.
• Although 76 percent of respondents reported that they motivate employees to treat customers fairly, only 62 percent provide the right tools and training to earn customer trust.
• While 76 percent reported that customer trust is tied to the financial success of the business, only 60 percent consider how a proposed action increases or decreases customer trust when making decisions.
• Most companies want to focus on enhancing the customer experience but are pressured for short-term results. Only 42 percent of respondents agree that their company can do what is right, despite the pressure to make current-period numbers.

“As the 4-P’s of marketing - product, price, place and promotion - become increasingly tactical, this study confirms that more companies are embracing the 3-I’s of marketing – customer insight, interaction and improvement – as the key to growing long-term profitable customers. However, there is room for improvement,” said Jeff Gilleland, Global Strategist for Customer Intelligence Solutions at SAS.

“Companies are doing a good job gathering customer data but are falling short at creating proprietary insight from it,” observed Gilleland. “You can’t manage the customer experience if you don’t know what your customer is likely to buy next or if they are going to attrite. Of the companies we surveyed, only 39 percent rate their capabilities as “good” or “excellent” in predicting a customer’s likelihood to purchase, cancel or leave. Looking around the curve and predicting future outcomes is where the value of customer insight lies.”

Some 60 percent of respondents report treating customers differently, based on an understanding of individual needs. “That’s important,” added Gilleland. “Needs represent the “why” behind the “buy”. Knowing individual customer needs enables a company to craft more relevant customer experiences to improve loyalty.”