Impact Media's SEO Blog

After the financial doom and gloom that has shrouded the nation for the past year or so, this morning’s announcement that we are out of recession will come as a welcome respite. However, for online retailers 2009 has been a bumper year, with a 14% year on year increase.

We may now be able to consign phrases like credit crunch to the jargon bin, but it appears that while the nation’s wealth has only been increased by 0.1%, online retailers have been experiencing bumper profits. £5.46 billion was spent online in December alone, which represents a 17% increase on the same period last year.

According to the latest IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, consumers have purchased 14% more online in 2009 than they did the year before. Positive movements have been seen in almost every sector, which goes someway to show just how dependent we are on the Internet and how keen we are to take advantage of its convenience.
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Businesses across the world are still feeling the effects of the recession pulling at their purse strings, which means turning to new ways to market their products.

Jumping on the social media band wagon is high street retailer, GAP. They have chosen to avoid traditional television advertising for its new line and are marketing their ‘Born to Fit’ range on the global networking site, Facebook.

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Across Europe the dark cloak of the recession is being lifted as France and Germany are now officially out of the recession.

This news gives new hope to the British economy and elsewhere across the world, however the French and German economies have not been hit quite as hard as the UK during the global crisis.

Britain was more heavily exposed when the downturn struck and consumers in the UK are more in debt than those in mainland Europe, the huge levels of credit were what supported the economy for so long.
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During a recession, everyone has two objectives: save money and make more. Internet marketing is an effective way to achieve both objectives and here are 5 top tips for marketing during the recession:

1. Smart Spending

Experts at Harvard Business School conclude that spending on marketing and advertising is one of the best ways to beat the recession. But you must get the most for your money. Internet marketing has many advantages over traditional marketing, but the most obvious is the low pricing structures. Internet advertising and marketing are a fraction of the phenomenal sums charged by traditional marketing and advertising agencies.

2: Precision Targeting

Internet marketing helps you connect directly with your potential customers. This is a significant advantage during a recession. Instead of widespread blanket marketing (the expensive kind), you can target your market by the area they are in and precisely how they are choosing to word their searches for your products or services.

To ensure a smart spend, you can target your marketing to a geographic area and set a budget that you can afford. Once you’ve had time to analyse the results, you can make smarter spending decisions.

3. Measure It

To ensure the cost effectiveness, you must be able to measure the success of your marketing. This has traditionally been very difficult to gauge from a television advert or billboard. But online marketing is fully measurable. This means you can analyse how effective your various campaigns are and drop the ones costing you money but not delivering desired outcomes.

Google AdWords is one of the most effective marketing/advertising weapons in your contemporary marketing arsenal. It allows smart spending, precision targeting and measurable results.

4. Give It Away

You may have less money, but you still have another valuable resource, time. Marketing effectively during a recession means building credibility. This involves giving away your expertise for free.

If you sell “Red Widgets” and every time I’ve got a question about my current Red Widget, I find the solution on your website, then I’m much more likely to buy my next Red Widget from you when the time comes. Blogging and article writing are marketing activities that cost only time and build credibility, loyalty and a relationship with your potential clients that begins long before they make the decision to buy from you and continues long after they’ve given you their money.

5. Change Your Story

Your customer tells themselves a story when they consider buying your product. They imagine themselves using, and they tell themselves a story about the benefits that it will bring. Whether it’s new office equipment, a motorbike lift or a piece of software, they tell themselves stories.

But during a recession, the customer’s behaviour changes, the story changes and focuses on security and stability, but also a tiny sliver of hope that they can return to spending freely. When your customer’s story changes you must respond by changing the elements of your business that your customer uses to construct their story.

Even during these recessionary times, Impact Media’s search engine marketing services still offer a cost effective to promote your business online. Find out more and if you’d like a no-obligation proposal as to how we could help, contact us to get full details and a risk-free SEO analysis of your site.

It’s a trying time for UK companies; you can hardly switch on the TV or the radio without hearing about the economic downturn and the gloom of the recession. Business leaders are under great pressure to take stock of their financial situation and cut back wherever possible; every pound saved means less dependence on immediate new business.

However, there is a slight paradox; if companies are to survive the recession and emerge strong and competitive with a healthy market share, then they must continue to invest in their sales and marketing to get more orders.

The wise choice then, is to market your company in a way that provides the best return on your investment. Those companies that have an online presence have an immediate advantage, since online marketing represents the most cost effective and beneficial opportunity to make a healthy profit.

As online marketing goes, the most immediate benefits can be achieved through the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies to push your business to the top of search engine listings in your chosen market.

By investing in the right SEO consultant to collaborate with you, you can increase the number of potential clients that find you online, based on the key words and phrases they have searched for in the likes of Google and Yahoo.

You may have the best products and prices in your market, and the confidence to provide a better service than your competitors, but if people can’t find you near the top of the list, you won’t get the opportunity to win their business.

You don’t need to sell products and services directly online to get the benefit of Search Engine Optimisation. Since a good SEO strategy is multifaceted by using a mix of optimised web copy, site content and article writing there are many different methods to grab the potential customer’s attention.

Once your business has been noticed and given attention by the customer, you can use a variety of cost effect direct marketing techniques (such as e-mail marketing) to encourage them to place an order.

Along those lines, it’s also worth remembering that a good SEO approach cannot only win new clients, but also help develop existing ones. As any marketing manager knows, it’s more profitable to develop additional business from existing clients than to solely rely on new ones, and online marketing is a perfect tool to achieve those results.

As consumers in the private and commercial sector look to get the best value for money in their purchases, they will invariably increase their online buying habits in the search for a better deal. This is comforting news for a marketing manager who is looking towards a strong online marketing push to get results.

Search Engine Optimisation is regarded by Internet experts and business leaders as the most effective and efficient way to transform your online presence into orders. SEO is a high impact tactic, and most importantly in these tough times, offers an excellent return on your investment.

If you’re a business looking to maximise the return on your marketing investment, Impact Media can help with cost effective SEO services.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (on holiday, of course), you’ll be well aware of the downturn in the global economy and the fact that even our politicians are now confirming the UK is entering a period of recession.

Is this the end of online shopping as we know it? Not at all. Web based businesses should see this as an opportunity to forge ahead and gain a competitive advantage. If consumers are looking to cut back, where will they start searching for bargains? Of course, it’s not always about being cheapest but whatever online business you operate, you should be looking to position your site infront of your prospects.

Perhaps now would be a good time to review your site (design, copy) and your online marketing activities (SEO, PPC)? You may need to get creative with your offers and offer more incentives? One thing is certain. Now is not the time to be cutting back on your online marketing budget!

Google’s online ad revenues will continue to grow despite the US economical downturn according to data released by eMarketer.

They predict that Google’s online ad revenues in 2008 will increase by 27.4% in the US alone. Even in comparison the other leading search engines (Yahoo, MSN and AOL) which take 25.7% of all US online advertising dollars Google exceeds them with a staggering 30.7%.

It seems that even in economical downturn that the power of online marketing shows through and it’s no surprise that when other areas of marketing spend are dropping of that online advertising continues to grow.

So if you’re looking for where to get the biggest return on investment for your advertising spend then why not look into online advertising.

Two recent snippets of news should bring some cheer amongst the incessant reports of recession and predictions of doom that seem to dominate the press at the moment.

Google announced yesterday that their revenue for the second quarter of 2008 topped $5.37 billion. This is an increase of 39% compared to the same period in 2007 and a small increase over quarter one of 2008.

Perhaps more importantly is the fact that within the UK, online shopping spend has increased by 38% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2007. The total amount spent online was £26.5 billion, according to findings recently published by IMRG and Capgemini.

UK shoppers now spend 17 pence in every pound online, almost 20% of total retail spending.

This could, of course, just be down to the fact that with many households feeling the squeeze they are turning online to ‘bag a bargain’ but hopefully the buoyant trend of Internet shopping will continue.

Hopefully we’ll be reporting more good news soon, including how rival London gangs have turned to hugging each other in a ‘love off’ and how Team GB are confident of winning at least one bronze medal in the Olympics*

*London, not Beijing