Series: Keeping Up in a Down Economy
Companies Turn Online to Manage Marketing Budgets
by Ronald L. Burgess – RedFusion Media 5/30/2009
Redlands, CA – June 8, 2009 – A fresh study by two respected researchers indicated that 41% of marketers in the business-to-business sectors will maintain this year’s budgets, while 25% will increase budgets. However, with the downturn in full swing, almost half of all marketers say they will spend more on web-related marketing.(i)
With an emphasis on return-on-marketing dollars, many turn to the web, because it is more measurable than traditional advertising; while others look at rapidly fading newspaper and magazine subscriptions and conclude that the Internet is where the exposure is.
By most indications, the Internet is the place to be, but companies without full-time marketing expertise find it difficult to know just where to put their advertising investment. I have included a new study from EMarketer in the table below so you can see how B-to-B marketers intend to spend their money. However, here is a simpler list of what to do in order of importance:
1. Attend to your website. Most websites are much too lean on content and pages. As a rule of thumb, if you are a very small company, add at least one new page every month. If you have more than 10 employees, add two to four pages per month. If you have over 50 employees, setup a monthly budget to spend solely on content. Make sure all your pages are ranked by Google (if not, have your site rebuilt to achieve this).
2. Study your web statistics. Learn how this works or use a web company large enough to have specialists for analytics and SEO.
3. Tone up your website’s online pitch and close. Few websites develop compelling asks and closes. Each industry has different selling cycles. The use of relationship building tools (like whitepapers and blog subscriptions to get contact information) is one online way to begin a long cycle.
Adding videos of well thought-out pitches and demonstrations moves toward a close, and compelling offers finish the deals. This can be expensive to translate to the web, so plan on spending a large percentage of a sales’ person’s salary to do this right. If you can increase the effectiveness of your website, your sales’ people will spend less time on getting the check.
4. Devote a budget for keyword advertising. Then, adjust your budget based on the cost-per-view and cost-per-lead. Currently, in most industries, this the lowest cost per lead across all media, except for referrals. Expect to spend one-third to one-half of your pure advertising budget on this activity, until you hit diminishing returns (i.e. when the cost per keyword does not yield more visits). RedFusion Media uses a system called Local Target Marketing that automatically reduces the spend when this has been reached.
5. Find ways to write more content (press releases, articles and events) for placement into RSS feeds.
Future installments of this column “Keeping Up in a Down Economy” will explore these in more detail. Or, follow the RedFusion Blog.
(i) Forrester Research and MarketingProfs, reported by EMarketer on May 27th 2009
