Just like many things in life, economic recessions come and go in cycles, and even though there is nothing official about a full-blown US recession yet, talk of the current downturn and impending doom is everywhere.
In such times, many businesses seem to have a kneejerk reaction of cutting down on their marketing as the first expendable thing on the list. Of course, this suicidal behavior is just the opposite of what you should be doing if you want your business to make it through the tough times. Rather than slashing your marketing budget, you need to be looking for savvier ways to market your business both online and off.
Writing in his blog, Seth Godin gives some precious insight into how you should be revising your business message and the way you market, based on a changing set of reasons for people to buy from you, and how you should adapt your marketing accordingly. But there’s more to it than that - you need to find smarter and more cost-effective ways to market too!
Smart marketing is easier online
Marketing on the Internet has two big advantages that will help see you through this economically difficult period.
For a start, there are a lot of things you and your employees can do yourselves - practically for free - such as blogging or publishing regular podcasts or vodcasts.
What’s more - and this is the big one - when you market online, it is so much easier to track and test how well your marketing efforts are doing. Whether you are running a pay-per-click ad campaign, blogging, or just want to get the best out of your website, you need to know how well every single thing you do is working. This way you are able to constantly improve on what you’ve got and avoid blowing your money on what doesn’t work. Of course, if your budget is tight, this sort of efficiency stops being a luxury and becomes a must.
The good news is that there are many online tools that will give you just this sort of information, including Google Analytics, which is free to use. With the help of a program like Google Analytics you can tell exactly where your website visitors are coming from and even follow the trends of what they do once on your website. This way, you can find out all sorts of interesting and important information, such as which web pages, blog posts etc are most popular, which ones convert best into sales, and which pages visitors are most likely to make visitors leave your website, just to give a few examples.
This sort of knowledge is vital if you want to optimize your web site and your internet marketing strategy to be as effective and efficient as possible at generating sales, leads or whatever you are after.
The ability to make the best use of all the available technologies to market smarter and more effectively will surely be one of the factors that determine which businesses will weather the coming storm and which ones will be washed away in the swell. Act now before it’s too late!
