The global recession of the last three years continues to see companies of all sizes limiting their annual marketing spend. Traditionally, as we all now,  in challenging business environments, marketing is generally perceived as a variable cost and budgets are therefore slashed as companies batten down the hatches and wait for the new ‘spring’ of business recovery to arrive.

However, I beg to differ in opinion as I believe this approach does actually lead to long term damage for the brand and profitability of those companies that undertake it.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. “Well you would say that, Mr Chartered Marketing professional. You just want us to believe that marketing still works when times are hard and waste money on people like you when really I should just cut my prices for a bit and generate sales that way!”

Well no I don’t actually. I am just basing my opinion on researched evidence and opinion which confirms that those companies, who continue to market themselves, albeit maybe in a different way, prosper more quickly than those that don’t during both the recession and in the following upturn. McKinsey & Co one of the world’s leading management consulting firms has recently found that those companies recover three times faster as economic conditions normalise. And just in case you didn’t know, Microsoft was started up during a recession and that when asked once how he would spend the last dollar in his pocket, Bill Gates famously replied “On Marketing!”

So why is this, I hear you ask?

Well, first of all, people don’t just stop buying in a recession, they just buy more safely. This should therefore be seen as an opportunity for businesses to maintain or even increase their marketing spend to focus on projecting the confidence and innovation necessary to give buyers the re-assurance they are making the right decision in going with them. This approach should be assessed at two levels – the product/service level and the communication level. At the product/service level, it is an opportunity to review the current marketing mix of product/service benefits and focus on the features that really gives your customers value, creates an empathy with them in this economic drought and instils confidence in them to buy from you.  At the communication level, messages can then be tailored to specifically communicate these values.

Secondly, if you fall into the trap of heavy price discounting as an alternative to marketing, you might increase sales in the short term but the long term result will be brand deterioration due to a lower perception of quality and hence lower profits.

Thirdly, failing to communicate during a recession could lead to an “out of sight, out of mind” perception as customers who notice that your brand has fallen silent will sense failure!

Finally, there is a new kid on the street during this downturn which was really in its infancy during the last recession – Digital Marketing!

In my opinion, digital marketing has the power to stop a business from failing in a recession. Yes, I advocate it that strongly!

Technology has transformed marketing over the last 10 years enabling businesses to now have a meaningful and constant cost-effective dialogue with customers and potential customers. As well as being a multi-channel media platform for talking about your products and services, it is also useful for research purposes as many customers prefer to provide information on-line now and the opportunity to respond to personalised digital communications creates a good perception about your brand in terms of understanding and loyalty.

A digital marketing strategy is also highly measurable unlike more traditional forms of marketing and as you might expect Google leads the way here providing a number of excellent free to use tools including Google Analytics, AdWords and Website Optimiser to implement and measure your digital marketing activity.

Here are the main components of an effective digital marketing strategy that Andrew Richard Digital Marketing would advocate.

1. A creative and easy to understand website should be the core focus of your strategy. The design and structure needs to firstly create a brand perception in line with the overall brand values and it then needs to be optimised to increase conversions, in other words the number of customers, sales (in the case of e-commerce sites) or sign ups (for future marketing activity like e-newsletters) that are generated from website visitors. Google’s Website Optimiser is a great tool for testing out different versions of your site and measuring how these different variables affect conversions. For example, you could provide 50% of your visitors with a blue website and the other 50% with a red one and compare conversion rates to determine which colour has a more beneficial effect on sales etc. Other variables can also be included to further optimise your website.
2. The basis of an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy also starts with the website as the text and image content of the site needs to be based on the key words that your target market would most likely use when searching for your products and services on the internet through Google, Yahoo and other search engine providers. A good web developer should also be involved in this process to ensure that all web pages and images have relevant Meta tags and alternative descriptions written into the website programming code based on these keywords to also help improve your search engine rankings.
3. Consideration to an affiliate marketing programme should then be assessed. Affiliate marketing is based around on-line relationships with other website providers where links are created to your site to drive more traffic and further increase your search engine rankings. These can be paid for links through a fixed fee or a pay per click model (see 5 below) or free of charge in some cases.
4. The website links can originate from digital display banner adverts placed on the affiliate’s website which could be either static in appearance (an image maybe with a strapline) or contain rich media content such as a promotional video.  An alternative option for link building is on-line press releases published on affiliate or relevant media websites. In both cases, content should be branded to increase awareness and enhance perceptions about your brand values.
5. Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is a digital media option that is growing at a substantial rate again with Google leading the way. PPC is a paid for form of SEO and ties in with the above mentioned digital display banners and affiliate marketing with the difference being that the affiliate is either a Search Engine provider or one of the Search Engine’s network partners. Google makes PPC available through Google AdWords where you can place text adverts or digital display banners on the Google search engine network in a PPC advertising campaign. The text adverts are the sponsored adverts that you always see in special areas of the Google search pages usually at the top of the page before the organic or SEO rankings or to the right of them. Each time a ‘searcher’ clicks on your sponsored ad, which appears after the searcher has submitted relevant key words as part of their search, you pay for that click at a price that you determine when you set the campaign up. The advantage of PPC is that it almost 100% guarantees you a certain number of page impressions on page 1 of Google unlike SEO which even the biggest SEO agency cannot guarantee. Google AdWords also offers a number of useful tools to help set up, monitor and measure AdWords campaigns. For example, the Keyword Tool provides statistics about global and local searches for your selected key words in terms of the number of searches made using those keywords each month. Another tool, the Conversion optimiser, looks at your conversion history, and automatically adjusts your campaign to improve the chances of your number of conversions increasing for the remainder of the campaign.
6. E-mail marketing campaigns are another cost-effective digital marketing method allowing you to send regular communications to your existing customers (maybe as part of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programme) and also to potential customers who might have requested them on your website. Communications can be created in the form of a branded HTML and CSS e-newsletter using a creative brand template consistent with your website design.
7. You can’t ignore Social Media either. I believe that social media has a digital role to play in every business to a certain extent.  And I am not just talking about Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn! There are a plethora of social media networks that you should consider using as part of your digital marketing strategy. But remember for each one you use, like with all the above mentioned digital marketing options, ensure that you measure its effectiveness in terms of generating business. Google Analytics which is another free offering from Google that historically allows you to measure your website traffic and the success of your AdWords campaigns now also supports the measurement of your social media activity.
8. This leads me nicely to my last component which is your CRM system and data management. It is imperative that you manage an effective and up to date customer relationship management system in terms of your customer and marketing data. From updating it with all leads generated via your website or social media to utilising the data for e-mail marketing campaigns or to conduct some market research (maybe via an on-line interactive PDF survey), the need to have your data in one place (your CRM) enables you to implement and monitor your digital marketing strategy effectively and accurately.

I hope that this article demonstrates that a digital marketing strategy is a cost-effective strategic marketing option in these difficult times which goes against the common notion that marketing during turbulent times is a no-go area.

Andrew Priestley is a Digital Marketing Consultant and Owner of Andrew Richard Digital Marketing.

www.andrewrichard.com