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- 6 Reasons You Should Invest in Internet Marketing During the Recession
6 Reasons You Should Invest in Internet Marketing During the Recession
10/13/2008 - By HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog
Here's why the "R Word" shouldn't stop you from making decisions about your internet marketing strategy
The most interesting aspect of the internet's impact on business from HubSpot's perspective is in how it has changed the nature of shopping and subsequently the shape of every vendor's sales funnel. Ten years ago, if a company was interested in buying a new product/service, it started by attending trade shows, reading industry journals, and going to seminars to learn more. Early in the shopping process, it would engage directly with the key vendors' (sales) people who would feed them asymmetric information from the top of their sales funnel to the bottom of their funnel. Today, that same process looks very different. The potential customer starts in Google by searching on relevant keywords. The prospect would spend time on each vendor's site, subscribe to the most interesting vendor blogs, subscribe to the vendor's customers' blogs, join an industry discussion forum, etc. Relatively late in the prospect's decision cycle, it would engage the vendor's (sales) people directly. That first vendor conversation today is much different from the one a decade ago because the prospect often knows as much about the vendor's product as the sales rep does and the prospect is already much more "qualified."Here's why the "R Word" shouldn't stop you from making decisions about your internet marketing strategy:1. Be Where People are Looking. Inbound vs. Outbound. The internet is primarily an "inbound" marketing channel where you "pull" prospects to you, by being where they are looking for your solution. The internet can deliver sales ready leads. If your prospect is looking for your solution, your sales cycle will naturally be shorter.2. Spend Time. Not Money. Almost all internet marketing strategies require more of your time and less of your money compared to traditional marketing and advertising solutions. Internet Marketing on LOCAL websites are extremely cost effective and more efficient than print.3. Everything is Measurable. You can test everything. Some people get a little carried away with measuring every move. Not every connection on a social network, every email blast you send or every blog post you write, etc is going to turn into business. But, when your online marketing activities turn into leads, opportunities and sales, you will know exactly what activity to do again.4. Your Competitors are Shifting Their Spending. According to eMarketer, more will be spent on online marketing and shifted from traditional marketing approaches. Can you afford not to be where your competitors are?5. Constant Improvement. If you're doing the same thing you did to advertise and market your business as you did 25 years ago, you have a problem. Your problem is not that you're still wearing bell-bottomed nylon suits. It's that you probably don't know what's working and what's not working. (See #3 above.) Measurability has a really interesting side effect. Since you can now measure things, you can now improve. I'm not talking about tweaking colors and copy. I'm talking about walking into the CFOs office and showing how you delivered more opportunities to the sales team on a smaller budget.6. Prepare for the future. It's hard to argue with the statement that the "fundamentals of our economy are strong". Ok, it isn't hard to argue with that. But, much more experienced marketers than I have proven that investing in down times is the surest way to capitalize on good times:When times are tough it is time to invest, not cut. This comes from years of research dating back to Ogilvy's Alex Biel and Millward Brown interaction surveys. All show that, if we cut marketing during such times, the impact is damaging and it can take you longer to get back to where you were.Of course, this is easy to say, but harder to do. The Pavlovian reaction is to cut, but the media industry can learn from someone like Rupert Murdoch, who historically has never done that. You'll see him investing in editorial and products at a time when other people are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The talk to do ratio is high, the doing is low.This article was provided by The HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing blog covers all of inbound marketing - SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Landing Pages, Lead Generation and Analytics.
Comments
Comments
- kate
Date: 10/15/2008
Just interesting support of internet marketing to keep in mind for us - conference and ICUS. :-) Gerri