Recession Looming: The Dumb Way and the Smart Way to React
According to a post by Neil Mason on ClickZ today, the dumb way for businesses to react to an impending recession will be to “slash sales and marketing costs across the board, batten down the hatches, and hope to ride out the storm.”
On the other hand, the smart way to react will also be to reduce sales and marketing costs!
Interesting. (I asked myself whether this was a typo.)
No it wasn’t a typo, and Neil Mason makes a great point: if your company is selling less, you will have to/ be asked to react accordingly and reduce the marketing budget to maintain profitability.
However, the SMART organization will not cut marketing budgets blindly across the board but will look at how to significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing expenditure.
And the tools to do that?
In the smart organizations, the marketing emphasis is likely to shift with three possible trends:
• An increased focus on multi-channel acquisition optimization
• Greater deployment of conversion optimization tools and applications
• Development of more robust and sophisticated retention marketing programs
Smart organizations will ensure that they are able to reduce the costs of cost per acquisition (CPA) programs not only through better channel optimization but also through correct attribution of sales or conversions to the correct channel.
The bottom line:
To leverage the investments in acquisition, smart organizations will ensure that conversion rates increase. The smart way to react
October 21st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
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