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As much as we would all like to believe that we're masters of our own destiny, the unfortunate truth in business is that growth stalls. Over the course of a decade, more than half of companies stall... and that's in normal economic times. Given what we're facing now, how should companies respond?

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The need to better align the sales and marketing organizations is generally well known. They are connected through their shared roles in motivating customer-purchase activities and divided by different cultures that concentrate on distinct portions of the customer-purchase funnel. There's no doubt that alignment is good, but what must you ultimately accomplish to drive performance and profitability?

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Marketers talk about asking for feedback all the time. Yet, few marketers take the time to really engage with subscribers on any level. That's why BettyCrocker.com stands out.

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Measuring your natural-search performance is definitely a good idea. However, establishing goals for your natural-search program is what will help communicate direction for the program and serve as a guide for measuring overall success. The challenge lies in establishing realistic goals in an achievable timeframe.

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You get it. Email needs to be relevant, timely, and personalized, and it has to arrive in the inbox—not the spam folder. When an email renders, it should load images perfectly, guide the eye through stunning, effective design that drives subscribers to convert—download, purchase, whatever. But effective one-to-one marketing is more than just email.

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Harnessing the power of customer insights throughout your organization produces a powerful, ongoing interactive connection with key constituents that competitors can't duplicate. Beyond the clever words and attention-getting visuals, the connection with the customer truly engages. When the product has been reviewed, when the ad is over, it's the feeling that remains that makes the sale and keeps the customer. If your marketing is based on customer insights, it's likely that your customers are going to feel understood—and therefore good about themselves. That's the feeling that will build the brand and drive sales.

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Before you ask me to go to work for you, go to work for yourself. When you've implemented the suggestions above, I'm more receptive to helping you connect with your next job opportunity. But I don't have time or inclination to work with job-seeking networking spammers. Heed the lesson of the online social networkers: "It's the relationship, stupid." You won't stay unemployed forever. But the work you put into documenting your accomplishments online and taking an interest in others in your field is a long-term investment in yourself.

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Marketers today understand that consumers think, feel, and react in ways different from June Cleaver some 50 years ago. We use descriptors like fickle, indecisive, and disloyal to describe the modern consumer. Just what do these terms mean? Mainly, they mean that consumers have too many choices—multiple brands, brand extensions, and sub-brands—and too much stimulation, especially online, making it nearly impossible to predict their next move. And yet, marketers continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on segmentation analysis and other research, hoping to understand and predict the behavior of these fickle consumers. It's as though they're still chasing June Cleaver when neither her modern counterparts nor today's consumerism as a whole bear any resemblance to the past. So what can marketers do? They can start by grasping the profound societal and technological changes that define today's new consumerism.

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A good landing page should tell a story. But filling the page with fluff isn't going to sell your product or service. There is a method to the madness behind the creation of a great splash or jump page. And it's a pretty systematic, organized, and detailed method, at that.

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Email marketing is likely your most effective tool for improving customer relationships, building brand awareness, and generating sales. It is also the most abused one. Practitioners of knee-jerk planning rely on emails to bolster a sagging month or fill in the holes left when other marketing techniques miss their mark. Even though it works (which is why it is abused), there is a price to be paid. Customers become disenchanted when they receive numerous emails promoting one sale after another or one product over and over. Everyone's threshold is different. Some may opt out after a week, others a month, and still others a year or more. (Note: there tends to be a jump in opt outs at the start of the New Year. People want to start fresh, so they do some housekeeping. If you saw a jump in opt outs in January, then you desperately need to review your email strategy.) The best way to avoid a mass exodus from your subscriber list is to have an email strategy that works with the rest of your marketing.

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On company Web sites everywhere, community sections are popping up—both a cause and an effect of a climate in which more and more marketing directors and brand managers are being asked by their companies, "Why don't we do something 2.0?" Although an online community can bring innumerable benefits to a brand, launching one is a project that should be considered carefully, to ensure that your efforts will have the desired results.

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Do video ads work to turn viewers into buyers and passionate brand advocates? For starters, measurement of the effectiveness of video ads gets bogged down by syndication, viral distribution, viewing via social networks, and many other factors. So how can you find out if your video ad "worked"—an even more important question in tough economic times when marketing budgets are tight?

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When done properly, win/loss analysis provides clarity and insights into customers' perceptions of your product, experiences throughout the sales cycle, and expectations created by your company messaging.

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Want to improve your online conversion rates? Reconsider your registration page. Whether your conversion process includes registering for a demo, signing up for an e-newsletter, or making a purchase, there are particular rules you should follow.

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Decision-makers who are worried over the stability of their company's finances should remember one simple truth: The source of your business's cash flow is your customer base. What all of this boils down to is the need to make smart, informed investment and cost-cutting decisions that have both a short-term and a long term perspective.