Experts say it's never wise to slash marketing budgets in difficult times. Rather, it's the time to define your niche and focus on the integrated marketing tactics that produce the best performance and ROI.
By now, many businesses are feeling the soft economy. Some may decide to trim expenses while others will maintain their budgets. It's hard to predict what will happen over the next six months. This could actually be an opportunity to gain market share because despite lower spending, consumers still need goods and services. By maintaining or increasing your marketing budget, your brand can stand out in a less crowded environment. However, it's time to scrutinize your marketing dollars, ensuring that your campaigns yield the best ROI and conversion rates.
One bright spot in the marketing horizon is emerging media, which includes search, social media, online video and mobile. Magna, a unit of The Interpublic Group of Companies, forecasts these media will grow 29.5 percent this year to $14.9 billion, and 25.8 percent in 2009 to $18.8 billion.
Even eMarketer, which recently adjusted its U.S. internet ad spend projection for 2008 to $24.9 billion from $25.9 billion, projects double-digit growth for internet ad spending (17.4 percent growth this year over last year). eMarketer stated in its report, "...Internet ad spending will continue to grow rapidly" at the expense of newspapers and television.
As marketers review their marketing tactics to weed out poor performers and maximize winners, it's time for your team to take a look at emerging media, conducting well-integrated campaigns.
Below is a crib sheet to bring you up to speed on emerging media. While this article focuses on search, I can't overemphasize the importance of integrating relevant digital marketing tactics with search to enhance your marketing efforts in the current economic environment.
Search engine marketing
eMarketer reports "search popularity draws ad dollars," as search engine use increases and is neck-in-neck with email as the most popular internet activity (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2008).
eMarketer analyst David Hallerman believes the economic slowdown could actually be good for search in two ways: (1) reduced revenue will encourage marketers to increase paid search budgets and bid higher for top-performing keywords, and (2) tight money will drive more consumers to search for bargains online.
Advertisers will spend $19 billion on search ads in 2012, up from over $10 billion projected this year.
Marketers have been shifting money from traditional to digital media since 2007. Today's climate couldn't be timelier for integrating digital media into your marketing campaigns, starting with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and organic SEO. Depending on your business model, you can consider paid inclusion, or focus on local search, vertical search, internet yellow pages, and even comparison-shopping search engines. The key is to know your target market and fine-tune your campaigns with analytics for the best ROI while leaving no stone unturned when it comes to digital media.
For instance, B2C sites might supplement a search campaign with an email customer loyalty program, or use customer retargeting to find those that got away. On the other hand, B2B sites will focus on lead generation and branding. Search campaigns provide both lead generation and branding, but you might want to supplement this with targeted display ads and an email marketing campaign offering a valuable whitepaper download.
Another good idea is to extend your organic visibility. Let's hope you already have good organic rankings. Even so, you can expand those rankings in two ways, (1) by creating new content in multimedia format for blended-universal visibility, and (2) by conducting a PPC campaign to harvest new terms for content optimization and creation.
- Design your PPC campaign for a wide reach so you can use analytics to sort your top paying keywords by conversion rate. Filter out the losers and identify the top 20 percent of key terms that significantly outperform in your PPC campaign. These will be the foundation of a new SEO campaign.
- Get everyone on your team involved in creating multimedia content around these key terms. While your copywriters create new pages featuring these terms, your developers will also use them in your title tags, alt tags and meta descriptions, and your linking team will generate inbound links using these terms as anchor text. Create content in various formats, using graphics, video and blogs if applicable for your business.
You can't miss with this approach because you know customers searched for these key terms before and found you, so it will happen again, providing more visibility in the SERPs, traffic and conversions. Be relentless in fine-tuning your campaigns with analytics to confirm ROI and conversions.
If your site is new, building traffic and conversions may take a little longer. Besides PPC advertising for instant visibility, try paid inclusion with Yahoo Search Submit Basic or Search Submit Pro. Another option is to try social media marketing.
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