You fought very hard in your organization to build in a reasonable budget for your e-marketing initiatives. Now, as a result of the “budget re-forecasting meeting”, you’ve been told that sales projections for the second quarter are off by 30% and now you must cut the “fat” from your expense budget by that amount to meet your department goals. You walk away from the meeting with your head down, wondering how you are going to continue the progress you’ve made with your website marketing. There goes the $2/click you were paying on AdWords and the $5/lead you were paying your affiliates.
Here’s the good news: You’re not alone. Though there is no real “safety in numbers” in the e-marketing world, you can take advantage of this time to re-focus your effots, save some money, and leverage the down economy to gain a competetive advantage. Since every other organization competing for high-visibility, high-traffic media is cutting their budgets as well, you have an opportunity to renegotiate with your vendors, and potentially lock in better rates for your campaigns. Take a look at CPC rates for your keywords and see if they are still trending up. Ask your vendors for lower rates in lieu of canceling your I/O’s. And, work with your affiliates on scaling the payouts more toward benchmarked achievement. In other words, you don’t have to simply cut. You can re-negotiate.
This is also the time to focus on your user interface. If you have to cut the amount you spend on generating site traffic, focus on improving the traffic quality and resultant conversions. Take another look at the data and ask yourself what can be done to improve your conversion rates. Are there content areas that need further development? What site features could be implemented at little cost to improve the stickyness of the site? What are the fundamental changes that can be made to the conversion funnel to improve your cost per conversion. Even if you increase your conversion rates by a fraction of a point, you will have likely done it at a fraction of the cost.
Search for Free and/or inexpensive distribution channels. Are you working the social media sites like MySpace and YouTube? Are you feeding out your content with RSS or other syndication platforms? Are you blogging and chatting about your products/services? How are your email campaigns going? Have you mined your database for a segment that you’ve yet to reach? Have you called your grandma and asked her to mention your website at bingo? Seriously, you’ve got a little more time now to focus on these outlets since you can’t go for the mainstream.
Lastly, consider your staff and your peers. There may be some fear out there that the real cuts are coming in terms of layoffs (thanks to our never ending news cycle on jobs reports). Challenge them to find more creative ways to meet goals on a reduced budget. You’d be amazed at what outside-of-the-box ideas are generated when the staff feels the pressure of budget cuts. Encourage your associates to brainstorm and communicate their ideas. There are no bad ideas in times like these. Speaking of labor costs, don’t hold off on replacing your vacant marketing position. Now is the time to source talent that will help bring your program to the next level, without overspending.
So, keep your heads up. This is not all gloom and doom like the presidential candidates and the actuarials make you think.
- Renegotiate with your vendors.
- Refocus on the user interface.
- Take advantave of free distribution channels.
- Lean on your team and your peers.
There are ways to continue what you’ve started and to attain your goals. You just have to get creative.
