Spend More Marketing In A Recession
Despite the credit crunch and downturn in the economy, now is not the time for businesses to reduce their marketing budget and particularly their expenditure on search engine optimisation. Some research suggests that 75% of businesses use search engines in order to find their suppliers.
We also know that marketing expenditure often dips in recession just at a time when companies need to hammer home to their target audiences how they differentiate themselves from their competitors. If anything, marketing spend should rise in an economic down turn. Pulling back in expenditure can often lead to loss of momentum in getting across marketing messages and can lead to consequent loss in customers and market share.
Picking up new customers and market share after the economy has picked up can take a long time. We all know that there is a lead-in time between investment in marketing and its results.
Admittedly, convincing clients to maintain their marketing spend or even increase during a recession it is not usually easy!
Search engine optimisation has shown to be more cost effective for many businesses than a pay-per-click approach. For those businesses that are prepared to invest in search engine optimisation they should, however, avoid designing their website purely to pander to search engines. We tell clients that they should design their website for users, primarily, and then for search engines.
This means that visitors to the site enter at the right page i.e. not always the home page. It means that businesses should not get obsessed with scattering too many keywords throughout the website. Copy should be appropriate and relevant for the page and the business concerned. Some SEO people will tell clients to drop in key phrases so many times per page; search engines actually prefer well written relevant content.
Designing a site for the user does, however, mean steering the visitor through the site through the use of what we like to call ‘hot keys’ and other tools. It also means encouraging, by good design, visitors to visit the more important pages of a site – pages that can lead to more sales or products and services providing the most profitable margins.
Daniel of Manchester Search Engine Marketing specialists message to existing clients and businesses at large is: invest in search engine marketing; it’s more important than some traditional forms of marketing such as advertising in a telephone directory, and for many businesses gives a much better return on investment than pay-per-click. We have clients that have recouped their initial investment within days through increased sales from their websites. One client went from 174 visits per month to 1968 visits a month within three months and plenty of sales to boot.
See SEO as an investment; many companies offering SEO can provide a monthly service for less than the cost of a fuel tank of petrol!
Peter Drucker, the late and great father of modern management, is famous for his remark: marketing and innovation are investments; everything else in a business is a cost. Those that invest in SEO stand a much better chance of riding out the economic storm, whilst those that don’t will be left with having to play catch up when the economic upturn comes about in a couple of years.