When we hear doom and gloom in the market companies tend to start the belt tightening, often cutting back on marketing spend, but is this really the smart thing to do?
When coming into times of recession we do need to analyse our business more than ever, and where a dollar can be saved or put to better use, we should be taking advantage of this. Cutting back on marketing can ultimately lead to a poor economy hitting our business more than it ever needed to. Smart marketing is needed to extract sales more than ever and targeting where our marketing spend is going.
When times are tough people do not forget what they wanted to buy, but will prioritise their spending to what matters most to them, a greater percentage of people will research more before they buy. If you are running a PPC campaign for instance you may find in tough times your spend is the same but the conversion rate is lower. People are researching more, buying less but are still keeping on mind what it was they wished to purchase.
Let's say for argument sake you are spending 6k per month on PPC, is it smart to keep this during a tighter market? How about we look at a smarter alternative. First we analyse our search and PPC traffic in particular the keywords that are driving traffic to the business. We then look at conversion rate over primary keyword use. You may of read in a previous article that long tail keyword phrases tend to convert at a higher rate than primary keyword phrases.
Any PPC company worth their salt know exactly what ads are converting for what keywords, and if you are managing your own campaign and using Google analytics you will also know what is converting and what is not. In most markets primary keyword phrases drive traffic, and the long tail of search makes sales.
So the first thing we are going to do is cut most of the primary keyword phrases out of our campaign and concentrate on the long tail phrases. You will of course notice a drop in PPC traffic to your site, but at the same time long tail phrases have a much lower cost per click, and a higher conversion rate so this maximises our ROI.
We are then going to put for example 2k per month into SEO, we are going to concentrate on the same long tail phrases and our primary keyword phrases related to our market. Because long tail phrases are easer to rank for, we will very quickly see the organic result listings running next to our PPC ads, this is a huge credibility booster to the searcher seeing your ad and organic results.
Now we are going to turn to our customer data base, creating tactical media with worth while offers and savings and perform a direct media campaign to the customer data base. A customer who has already bought from you is 65% more likely to purchase from you again than a new customer.
We can take this same tactical flyer and extend our reach into the greater community with a targeted flyer distribution, every client we have using tactical targeted flyer distribution is reporting good results. When you look at the fact 5000 full colour two sided flyers are only $495 and add $250 for distribution we have a powerful cost effective marketing resource.
In essence we have taken a committed marketing spend and made it work for our business over 4 mediums.
Marketing is one area of the business that should not have it's budget cut but should be spent wiser and with maximum viability for success. SEO coupled with tactical media marketing is a very powerful marketing resource.