Craig Sullivan recently outlined a number of innovative approaches to marketing through the experimental capabilities of online data. Integrated approaches such as the ones he outlines should form the backbone of the future of marketing. For the most part, I can see these approaches as being particularly effective for small to medium sized business users which often find barriers such as resource inequalities versus their larger competitors.
Sullivan states that:
Online is still too often thought of as a separate, hermetically sealed bubble, set apart from the rest of the business. This is something that is really dumb, and it makes me angry. Online is measurable, you can be experimental; you can test different things and find out a lot that you couldn’t possibly find out elsewhere.
He envisages both pioneering and these increased use of online data to segment and target particular markets using offline marketing channels.
The articles are both here (on online data and offline marketing) and here (on multivariate testing as a tool for analysis)