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Recession Survival Tips for Web Marketing & Online Business

Rework, Revisit, Reach Out: Survival Tips for Online Marketing Strategies

"Web marketing is an ideal investment during a recession."

In a recession climate, companies will go one of two ways, either become the cautious cat with a wait and see attitude, spending carefully on their marketing, or spending less, cutting back, or they become the ferocious lion, being bold and taking advantage of their competitor's caution to seize leads and chances in a tough market.

Whatever your stance, it is good to remember that web marketing is an ideal investment during a recession. Online marketing, although short term focused, is quick to set up, measurable, and from that, easily altered to ensure the message is entirely on target and optimised. Infinitely preferable to a lock in marketing strategy or partnership perhaps?

Here are Harmony's three "Recession Rs" to help you and your business take advantage of your online marketing during this challenging time.

Rework

If you are creating content offline, put it online too. Materials from events such as presentations, reports and speeches are perfect to add to your site, allowing event participants to look back, and those who missed out to catch up and benefit from the material. Also, by presenting this information in more diverse formats, you make that content more engaging, though text content will always be indexed by search engines more efficiently.

Take a critical look at your site, are all your pages right up to date, not a dusty corner with some out of date content that is still receiving a lot of traffic (perhaps through a search engine result). While you are checking, consider a little rephrasing to work your key phrases into the page, update your page titles and ensure the description is up to date for your search engine listings.

Break open your analytics package, and identify your top pages for traffic and entries. It is more than likely your top pages is the index page, but remember the home page is not the only entry point to your site. Optimise the pages people enter on; ensure they are efficient as landing pages.

At the other end of the stick, identify the pages where there are high bounce rates (high numbers of people entering the site and leaving quickly without visiting another page) and high exit rates (existing visitors leaving the site.) Try to identify why these rates are occurring, and whether you can make changes to the content, structure or layout to encourage those visitors to stick, linger a little longer, or more importantly, convert.

Revisit

Don't reinvent the wheel, make contact with your existing customers, including those who have lapsed. Tesco.com uses a "commitment-based segmentation’ or ‘loyalty ladder’ based on the activities of a customer. The activities and segment that a customer falls in triggers different types of communication from Tesco, from follow up emails offering discounts to a tentative buyer, to personalised alerts for regular customers.

• If you are already using email marketing, review it to ensure you're on target. Aim to achieve a click through rate above 5% on each of your communications. If you're not, or you don’t know, you need to find how.

• There are four things you need to know before creating and sending a marketing email:

  1. 1. Who are you sending to?
  2. 2. What do they want?
  3. 3. How and when do they want it?
  4. 4. How will they use it?

Open those analytics again, look closely at your customers and their behaviour, and try to better understand them and their needs. You may be surprised, hopefully not too surprised though. It may be obvious, but if you look after and understand your client, they'll provide you with marketing gold, word of mouth recommendation.

Reach Out

• Try social networks, you may find your customers or employees are already talking about you on there (just hope it's positive). Help them to share your content over these networks, interact with them. This is a medium people check more often than their emails quite often, make sure you utilise the retention. Offer incentives, discounts, discussion.

• Finally, engage with your customers and potential customers. Diversify your media and communication channels – post your product videos on Youtube (all it costs is time), answer questions on Yahoo Answers, collect and act on feedback. Invest time.