5 Online Tips for Weathering the Economic Crisis

According to MarketingCharts.com, Agency Clients Slash Budgets 20% or More, Digital Only Bright Spot.

Digital is always the bright spot!

It is not just agencies that are slashing budgets. Companies large and small are looking for ways to scale back costs and increase efficiencies.

Here are the highlights from the MarketingCharts survey:

• More than two-thirds (70 percent) of global ad agency CEOs say that their clients are cutting back their 2009 budgets, and more than 83 percent of that group say those cuts are at least by 20 percent, according to the latest Agency CEO Survey by Worldwide Partners Inc (WPI).
  
  
• Digital marketing is one of the few bright spots in the survey, WPI said, with half the CEOs citing it as a growth area in 2009. Among North American CEOs, 62 percent said that they think digital will grow this year, while 39 percent of non-North American CEOs said the same.

Where should you spend your digital time and dollars? Start with the 5 areas below.

5 Online Tips for Weathering the Economic Crisis

1. Get Back to the Basics: Write good website copy that resonates with your customers’ needs and desires.
   
   
2. Understand Search Marketing: Can your customers find you online? People google, and they do not always know your brand or product name. Ensure your site is optimized to appear in results for the words your customers use to describe your product or service offerings.
   
   
3. Reach Out to Your Fans: Your current customers are your biggest fans. Give them ways to spread the good word about what you are doing. Embed code, email newsletters, RSS feeds: each of these are ways that people can subscribe to your content, stay in touch, and forward on anything that is of value to their friends and family.
   
   
4. Use the Whole Buffalo: Repurpose your content as many ways as you can. If you create a great whitepaper, use portions in your newsletter or as blog posts. If you write a datasheet for your sales force, re-work it as an end-consumer 1-pager. There are lots of clever ways to build on the materials you have already created.
   
   
5. Ask for the Sale: Make sure that calls to action are clear on every page of your website. A website is not a sales brochure, it is your Number 1 Sales and Marketing Person. Make the site work hard to generate leads and conversions. Each page should have a purpose and move visitors to accomplishing a measurable goal, even if that goal is sticking around to read the next page.

Show Us Your Balls (and we mean that in the politest of ways)

Boxcar Marketing has been working with James Sherrett of AdHack and Jay and Leah of Giant Ant Media to promote the Show Us Your Balls Super Bowl-esque Commercial Contest. We filmed the beginning of an ad, developed a marketing plan with ringtones, mp3s, avatars and other magic. Now we want you to choose the product the ad is for and finish the script.
http://www.AdHack.com/balls

What are the balls about?

It was Super Bowl, which is one of the last mass media experiences that we share. Super Bowl is particularly important for the ad industry ($3 million for a 30-second spot) and we think that spending $3 million is not ballsy, but handing over the creative direction of your ad to your consumers is a really ballsy move.