Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category
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In an Economic Downturn Online Marketers Need to Get More Competitive
With evidence of a market downturn appearing daily in the media, it’s only a matter of time before marketers’ budgets get slashed. The good news is that in a difficult economy, only the smart survive, and when the economy inevitably rebounds, you may be able to leapfrog your competition. Continue Reading
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What if there’s an economic downturn?
There is lots of speculation about an imminent economic downturn. Whether it’s happening now or will happen later (or much, much later), as marketers, we must ask ourselves how is this going to impact my job, my budget — and my career? How can I prepare for it?
For the last few years, we in the online marketing space have been enjoying pretty strong tailwinds. For the first time in a long time (I have been around the block for a while), Marketing has been able to leverage revenue growth into larger budgets with relative ease.
Scrooge-like CEOs and tight-fisted CFOs have been allowing growth in marketing and advertising budgets less grudgingly than usual. They still consider it ‘a mystery wrapped in an enigma’ – but have been arguing less with Marketing about the need to spend.
So I wonder how seriously most marketers are taking concerns about a slowdown in the economy when developing and executing their demand-generation and marketing plans.
Whether or not a downturn is imminent, or already here, this is probably a good time for Marketers to take a breath and do some contingency planning.
The current model Marketing has been using to budget goes something like this: “I need a bigger budget because our revenues are growing, and media costs and the cost of pay-per-click keywords are escalating. So if we want growth to continue, we need to spend more”
But what happens when revenue growth slows down? Continue Reading
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Is Search Still Worth It? Let’s do the Math…
According to MarketingSherpa’s “Search Marketing Benchmark Survey,” search marketing budgets are set to increase in 2008. OK, nothing new here.
But wait, here is the gem:
According to Stefan Tornquist, MarketingSherpa’s research director, “Most of the budgets were growing because search marketers thought that keyword prices would go up”
So, in other words, marketers will spend increasing amounts — to get the same results.
WOW, that’s impressive.
*Smart* marketers, however, will optimize the online conversion rate and get more business from the traffic *already* coming to the site…
So – no need to increase the budget. Just market smarter.
