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.
Whether or not the fundamentals of the economy are weak, the more the media talks about recession, the more likely it becomes. MediaWeek today said that online advertising is starting to feel the heat of the downturn.
Your focus as a web manager or online marketer in a down economy should be to get more competitive with the dollars you’ve got. Especially if your competitors are short-sightedly cutting their marketing spending, you now have an opportunity to increase your market share.
As Raquel said a few weeks ago, in an economic downturn marketers have to do more with less.
Start by evaluating your marketing and sales funnels’ areas of “efficiency elasticity”.
Most of our clients have found that their website landing page and conversion funnel experiences represent the easiest efficiency gains. If we can increase their conversion rates by 20-30% or more, that extra revenue goes directly to the income statement without increasing traffic-generation expenses.
Then, once you’ve optimized your web site conversion, you’ll have raised the break-even bar on where you can spend your ad dollars. More media opportunities (with lower competition) will give you a competitive advantage.
Next week we’ll talk some more about how to increase your conversion rates. In the mean time you can download free conversion rate improvment resources and get started now.
April 23rd, 2008 at 8:04 am
[...] Online marketing is clearly more measurable and accountable than offline and deserves to have an increasing proportion of advertising spend. But that also means that it will get even more competitive and expensive as the large players pour more effort into it. During difficult times you need to spend more time sharpening your axe to increase your competiveness. [...]