How E-Marketing can Save Your Company During a Recession
Written by Smartt Team on September 3, 2009
When business slows during an economic recession, companies are faced with the challenge of deciding how to allocate their time and resources to make it over the hump. For many companies, one of the first things to go is the marketing budget. Resources need to be used wisely and many businesses fall into the trap of saving money on an “expendable” area, such as marketing.
This is an unfortunate decision. In order to attract more customers, businesses need to do more marketing, not less. The problem lies with the use of money. Marketing can be expensive, and with less people able to spend their disposable income on your product or service, many businesses opt to cut back on marketing for fear that they are wasting their efforts.
But marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. Especially when you use the internet. The internet gives you the ability to reach millions of potential buyers at a comparably low cost. This will allow you to gain more clients, without stretching your already tight budget too thin. The decisions you make during a recession will determine your future success. So it’s absolutely imperative that you make the right choices now.
How E-Marketing Can Help
E-marketing is the most cost-effective way to reach your customers. There are many strategies you can use online, many of which are completely free. Getting your site to rank higher on the search engines for your keywords is one way to increase business. These days, people are lazy when it comes to the internet. Most of the time when someone does a Google search, they never make it passed the first page. First page results are seen as the most important and most relevant results. Results on the second page or later aren’t looked at nearly as often as first page results.
The good news about this is that, anyone has the ability to rank well on the search engines, by doing a little optimization. The traffic generated from this method is completely free. When you optimize your website for the proper keywords, you’ll attract qualified leads to your site that are likely to convert into customers.
Beginning Your E-Marketing Campaign
The first step in any e-marketing campaign is to have a website. Without a website you’re not even in the game, much less doing well. A well designed, professional website is key. It represents the face of your company on the internet and creates an impression with your clients. Not having a well designed and informative website leaves clients with a feeling of unprofessionalism and creates distrust with your clients.
Not all websites are created equal though. The trick is to create a website that allows visitors to learn about your industry in a non-threatening, non-sales way. One of the best ways to do this is by starting a company blog right on your website. Blogs are an informal way to teach prospects about your industry and give them expert advice. The best part about blogs is that they tend to rank well on the search engines.
Another useful technique is to do an article writing campaign. As a rule of thumb you should write 20 articles and submit them to an article distribution site. This will help you in two ways. First, every time one of your articles is picked up, it will give you a back link to your website, increasing your SEO. Second, it will help get the word out about your product and people who read your articles will be able to visit your website to learn more about your company.
E-Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive, which is especially important during a recession. When done right, a successful e-marketing campaign has the potential to bring in a huge return on your investment by attracting more clients and bringing in more business. For very little money, it allows your business to go from making little or no money to thriving during a time when others are failing.
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