Web Promotion in a Recession
During this time of economic downturn, when business is diminishing and your counting every penny, it is essential to invest in your business’s future growth. The last 10 years have seen the world wide web grow into a whole new medium that wasn’t around during the last recession. Business is booming unbelievably online and the rate of the internet’s growth is matched only by the contraction rate of traditional enterprises.
The world wide web is known by the vast majority as the place to go to find an immediate answer to their question, the solution to problems, or best value item. It’s ideal for window shopping since you can compare several shops in a few short clicks. Although this has been beneficial for many, it has worked against some businesses who do not sell on price.
We know one thing for sure, the internet has traffic, and internet traffic is quite easily measurable as a commodity. We know where the surfers are going and what they are looking for, and we can put websites in their path based on that data and essentially, meet the consumer’s needs. This has evolved into an efficient way of “buying” customers, which, in essence is what every business does when they advertise. When you look at the cost of customer acquisition online, you can see that it is far more cost effective than the equivalent in high street advertising.
The businesses that put themselves in the way of this traffic now by investing in online marketing and promotion are the businesses that will make it through the recession. The economy is predicted to contract by 3.5% during this year, it is then predicted (rather optimistically) to return to growth in 2010. The purpose of this article is not to discuss whether that will happen or not, but if we do see economic growth in 2010, that will make this the least damaging, shortest economy slump on record. After all, having 7% of the population unemployed, still leaves 93% working and spending money.
Intelligent business owners in the country will be investing in market share during the slump during which time their competitors will be struggling to survive. Some companies are still growing in spite of the downturn, in order to be one of them, it’s as simple as moving with the times and taking advantage of the online oppertunities that are available.
Research shows that during an economic boom, for every 10 spent on advertising, you’ll return 19, in an economic slump however, for every 10 spent you’ll return 51. The reason for this is that during a recession there are far fewer companies advertising, so with each advert, there are more customers to be had.
The are different options available to increase the amount of traffic to your website. “Search engine optimisation” is one of them. This is essentially the process of getting your website to climb up the results rankings of search engines, the main focus being on “Google” as they have over 80% of the internet’s total search traffic. Pay-Per-Click is another way of increasing your website’s exposure. This involves putting your website near or at the top of Google’s paid listings. Although this is a much faster method than search engine optimisation, it will be more expensive in the over time as you have to pay a pre-set amount every time your ad is clicked on.
Put both of these mehtods into practice, along with an email newsletter in order to update your clients about what you’re up to, combine with article submission and a blog, and you can end up with a huge online presence, ensuring your company’s survival and growth during the recession.
