Ten Ideas For Marketing In a Recession

I have to believe that just about every marketer (maybe except those in the green energy industry) are being ask to cut back, become more efficient, and more effective with their spend. I know we are always asked to do that , but this time it’s serious. It hasn’t been this serious since the 2001 Dot Com bust.

So what are you doing about it? TopRanked Online Marketing recently ran a poll where they had over 400 business marketers respond to the question “What three internet marketing tactics will you emphasize in the next 6 months? Here are the results of the poll:

• Search engine optimization (36%, 149 Votes)
• Blogging (33%, 134 Votes)
• Pay per click (26%, 107 Votes)
• Email marketing (22%, 89 Votes)
• Social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) (21%, 86 Votes)
• Blogger relations/blog PR (14%, 56 Votes)
• Microblogging (Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku) (11%, 47 Votes)
• Affiliate marketing (11%, 47 Votes)
• Advertorial (NewsForce, AdFusion) (10%, 40 Votes)
• Video marketing (7%, 29 Votes)

Not surprisingly, the top three are all related to getting more optimized search rankings. If I can improve my organic search (i.e move up my page position and keywords in various search engines) I can investment less in non-organic search i.e pay per click, and potentially attract more inquires overall. Truth be told these all seem like top priorities in any business environment, recession or not.

What else should we be thinking about? After living through the Dot Com experience I thought I would share my Top Ten actions for recession marketing.

1.      You will live or die within your customer base: In times of economic uncertainty, when budgets are getting cut back, people buy from who they know. This means you’ve got to engage with the customer base more frequently and deeply than ever before. Might be a good time to start a customer community or referral program.

2.      Customer marketing content becomes king: Content relating to customer ROI, success stories, problems solved etc becomes vital to your messaging success and sales support.

3.      TCO & ROI are Mandatory: Understand how you reduce your total cost of ownership and what the ROI is for your solutions, and quantify these. See point # 3.

4.      Measure Everything: Know what works, and what doesn’t, and stop what doesn’t.

5.      Invest in Communications: Communications becomes a high ROI tactic in tough times. Use it! Make sure your PR firm is using all the social media tools at your disposal to get your message out. To this end if you don’t have a PR firm then start a twitter page, start a blog, brand a You Tube channel, and develop some viral content. Its low cost and it works.

6.      Data is king. For push marketing make sure you have good enriched customer data so you can segment by multiple criteria. The more targeted you get, the more effective your message and conversation. In answer to your next question, Yes we still need some old school push marketing. I would not bet my career on hoping my blog generates business in a recession.

7.      Use the phone. If you have a good inside prospecting and customer database and have access to tele-sales/marketing (insoruce or out) use it to keep engaged with customers. Work with sales to programatize blitz days, identify reasons to call, prospect within your database, and use your calling resources to do the initial selling before handing off to outside sales people (could lower your cost of sale). Be careful where you use tele in the demand funnel. Note I said “inside prospecting database”. Pure outbound cold calling is very expensive, and not very effective unless your value proposition is incredible.

8.      Stay close with sales. You’re in this boat together and you will either join forces or sink. Work with sales; understand what is and what is not working. Develop strong joint measures.

9.      Have a Strategy. Strategy is about sacrifice and if everything is a priority then nothing is a priority. If you have no priority then you will sprinkle your marketing dollars all over the place and have no impact. No impact says good bye to your job in the next round of cost cuts. Ask the hard questions. Is segment x more important that segment y? Is Country B more important that Country C?

10.  If you have “Social Media Strategist” as a Title change it: Call yourself marketing, customer marketing, installed base marketing etc. Most management is old school and unless you can show revenue generation coming from Twitter then reposition yourself closer to revenue generation.

I’m sure there are lots of ideas about marketing in a recession.  Please share a few as I could use all the help I can get. Nuff said.

Comments

[Eric Polatty]

Excellent post. The difference with online now vs. 2001 is that a much greater percentage of the population has access to broadband, so I doubt we'll see a real crash like we did back then. Also, social media allows marketers to deepen the relationship and utilize word of mouth more than ever before. WOM has always been extremely important. With social media, it's infinitely more powerful.

[Chris Kocher]

Good article. Key is to focus on exisitng customers where you can close more sales faster with higher probabilty and less cost. Also the list ranks some of the least expensive alternatives highly. No surprise in tough times.

Chris Kocher
Managing Director
kocher@greyheron.com

[Alan Gloyne]

Great Points. As an advocate for Social Networking, the traffic growth in this area is huge, this article http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/05/social-network-spending-to-increase/ has some interesting statistics.
With that growth comes cost effective technology solutions to infiltrate these diverse social networks. Well worth the effort to consider this next social wave to build contacts and hopefully sales.

[BizBlogged1]

Not only in recession period, the listed strategies are the effective means of marketing. Its great to know that Blogging had 2nd place and video sharing at last position is somehow disappointing.

www.bizblogged.com - Finance blog, Finance, Economics, Corporate Finance, Personal Finance, Investing and Marketing

[Shel Horowitz]

Good enough post that I twittered the link. Thanks.

Shel Horowitz, author of five marketing books and blogger since 2004

[Jon Miller]

Good stuff! I recently wrote about the importance of getting the most about of your current assets in an article called 7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession. Like your #1, my top two are "maximize the value of every lead" and "focus on your house list".

http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2008/06/7-strategies-fo.html

[Sarah Carter]

Hear Hear!
Its sad to think that it takes such a serious change to the economy for a lot of us actually really think about what works, and what's good enough and what's an absolute necessity. (I count myself in that number).

I've got to say though I'm surprised that Stay with Sales is so low down the list. Its, IMHO, the combination of working with the sales team, and having them deliver a lot of the other items (social networking, blogging etc) that drives the results.

Sarah

[ed]

HI Sarah

There is no rank order to the list. To your point staying intune with sales is very important.

Thanks for your comment

[deborah kania]

i like these ideas because they remind of us that we should be doing these all of the time, no matter the economic climate.

in a recent survey we conducted, 72% of marketers will spend same or more in 2009. Not surprising is that most marketers will be increasing online advertising spend. However, many said they have found making online advertising payoff a challenge. While many traditional offline media will get less of these marketers’ money next year, direct mail seems to be holding its own.

Does this match your plans for 2009?

From small consulting companies to the country’s #1 retailer, marketing decision makers shared their plans for 2009 in our online survey. Download your copy of the complete survey results: http://www.brightworksinteractive.com/marketing-survey.html.

all the best to you all in the new year.

[Jeff Paul Internet Business]

I was just looking around for material on internet marketing and stumbled on your post. Nice post. I’m still looking for materials for my research.