You may be one of those people who think brainstorming is a woolly management idea which takes your team away from their real jobs, yet produces very little (while requiring significant expenditure in biscuits). But most people who have attended a brainstorming session run by an experienced facilitator will be great fans - I became a convert many years ago after attending one at an open day run by a local management consultancy.

However, it’s quite possible to run a really good session without professional outside help. The Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog explains what you need to know in Take Your Brainstorming from Good to Wicked-Good, where author Paul Williams explains that it’s how you analyse the ideas which makes the difference.

Online marketing is a classic case of where your sales team can come up with some real eye-opening insights if you give them a chance, and a brainstorming session may be just the place to do it.

Most of the people looking for your products and services online use the search engines. Some of them will find you because they’ve typed in search terms - or “keywords” - for which you do well in the search results. You can see what they typed in by consulting your visitor statistics. But others type in keywords which you don’t do well for, and they never find you. What are they typing in? It’s imperative you find out, and work on ranking highly for those keywords too. You can guess some of them - others you can find out by research. But ranking reasonably well for everything relating to your products and services is only half of the battle. You then need to determine which keywords get you customers, not just any old visitors. They’re the ones you should focus on.

Finding them takes analysis and patience. But it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of a successful B2B website. That’s why we launch into the subject in weeks 2 and 3 of the Insider Programme, which I hope you’ll consider joining.

A short article on Marketing Profs Daily Fix called Keywords, Keywords, Keywords talks about a good presentation which you might like to download. Follow the link there and the PDF slideshow you want is called Keyword Research - Do’s and Don’ts (September 16, 2008).

One of the articles I referred to last week suggested the economic crisis hasn’t reached many of our businesses (although that wasn’t the point of the article), and a reader here emailed me to ask “what planet is that guy on?”

I’d actually run a seminar a few days before, attended by marketing managers from UK industrial companies, and I have to report the outlook was - perhaps surprisingly - upbeat. I guess it just depends on what business you’re in. It’s not boom time for readers in the construction sector, I’m sure. And even if business continues to surprise you, it’s got to be good sense to plan for a downturn in the next couple of quarters, even if it hasn’t hit you yet. That’s why I’m suggesting that if there’s ever going to be a time to rip up your marketing plans and relaunch them based around your website, now is that time.

Anyway, the Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog reports on a survey of over 600 members which suggests that cuts are already happening. Marketers Expecting Cuts During Economic Crisis says that 52% of marketers are already making changes to plans and budgets and 65% expect negative effects on marketing overall. Even more, 75%, say the impact of the crisis will extend through 2009 and into 2010.

Whilst the respondents to this survey are from a wider base (geographically and business-wise) than most readers of this blog, I doubt there’d be a dramatically diferent response from UK industrial marketing. However, a recession is the least expensive time to increase market share, so it’s crucial to remember that marketing is not a discretionary expense. And online marketing can be the most efficient element of the marketing mix - because if done right, it should be the least speculative part.