Social Marketing During a Recession

By Gadook

Why Use Social Marketing During a Recession?

By Jan Morgan

The question actually should read why aren’t you using social media marketing during a recession? Let’s start with the basics regarding sales. A sales cycle begins with marketing efforts to keep the pipeline at full capacity at all times. Sometimes the sales cycle can be a lengthy period of time beginning from the time you prospect until the time the check hits the bank. Long cycles are especially prevalent when an economy is suffering. If the pipeline is allowed to dry up due to a lack of marketing efforts a gap develops that is directly proportional to proceeds.

The poorest decision a business can make during a severe economic downturn is to reduce marketing activity. Customers always think about purchasing they just hold off during challenging times until they can afford it. It is very important to remain on the radar screen at all times. Consumers love to spend money and some say it is a pent-up need. Being in the forefront of a buyers mind when they are ready to purchase is a good thing. As the economy gets better spending increases, sales cycles shorten and you won’t be caught off guard wasting time ramping up your advertising efforts. Just like good boy scouts you should always be prepared. Cutting back is a sure fire decision that will cripple your capability to bounce back quickly and get back on top of your sales game.

Necessity is the mother of invention and although current times are difficult its time to get creative and remain ahead of the competition. This recession’s time-span may be painful to many businesses and the expense daunting but it doesn’t have to be.

Welcome to the World Wide Web and Social Media. Social Media is an exceptionally cost effective tool for any business to take full advantage of. A new style of peer to peer and word of mouth social marketing has emerged and elevated to very impressive proportions. In the beginning of 2009 Facebook added critical mass of over 20 million people in a short 3 month period. Twitter is now the fastest growing community site with 1382% uplift from 2008 to 2009 with 5 million unique visitors a month. Astronaut Mike Massimino used Twitter in space during the Hubble Space Telescope repair. The “tweet” smell of success has online marketers saying it all in 35 words or less.

Another excellent cost effective tool is search marketing or researching your market online through intent, in other words, those conversations that are fine-tuned to your product or service through a keyword tracking service. These are real-time analytics that categorize what people are searching for or discussing worldwide on the internet. There is no recession on the internet. The internet is a global market of 1,668,870,408 people as of June 30, 2009.

Waiting to embrace Social Media will predictably leave reluctant business owners scrambling to understand the transformation of marketing strategies. Currently, we are at the apex of huge transformations especially in online marketing. Revolutionary ideas, sophisticated tools and incredibly smart people have converged and the world is changing.

It’s true that marketing is transforming. Personally, I love how the wrongs of big grown-up corporations are apologizing for their horrid lack of customer service because of a single youtube video gone viral. To me technology has created a type of customer first attitude just like in the old mom and pop corner market days. People are talking and tribes are listening. Furthermore, online marketing levels the playing field allowing bright entrepreneurs to compete like never before. The old marketing style of shouting out your brand or product has fallen on deaf ears for years because people have learned to mute and just tune out or fast forward through the psycho babble.

By educating yourself and expanding your online knowledge about the vast number of social media platforms and interactions you’ll remain the bull’s eye inside the winners circle. Middle managers who need to sell the idea of social media to upper management that haven’t been paying attention or are reluctant; your time will arrive to be a star. It is a crucial time to learn new skills and become educated about social media. For the most part it’s fun, it’s free and it’s expanding at an extremely accelerated pace.

Published by Gadook