The budget axe is falling. Marketers everywhere have to choose which campaigns and which channels survive. As a result there is a robust debate about which tactics work best and which channels are "must haves" versus the fun but expendable "nice-to-haves."
As usual, the decision often depends on the objectives marketers seek to achieve. In this environment, management wants low-cost, fast-acting and dependable ways to get attention, traffic, interaction and sales. Many branding and positioning initiatives get quickly sacrificed when cash runs short, even though the media for accomplishing these objectives is heavily discounted and subject to aggressive negotiation.
A key decision criterion seems to be the ability of a campaign or a media channel to convert a prospect into either an active lead or a sale. Viewed through this lens countless blog readers and Facebook friends become more of an abstraction and less of a measurable means to deliver business value. Ironically many of the highly hyped tactics -- online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing -- are sorted OUT because of their limited track record in delivering quantifiable results. Though today they are cheap enough and accessible enough for marketers with a few extra bucks and some extra imagination to use creatively and break through to hard-to-reach customer or prospect segments.
Search (both SEO and PPC) and e-mail are the work horses in a recession. The costs are containable, the targeting can be quickly and effectively tweaked plus the ROI has been proven again and again.They are sufficiently interactive to meet "social" marketing needs and can be deployed almost on-demand to suit anxious CFOs.
Another recession-centric focus is on current customer bases and CRM tools. This starts with the notion that its easier and cheaper to sell more to existing customers than to seek out and persuade new ones. But a farming versus hunting orientation depends on the agile use of data, since one-size-fits-all campaigns against a house list rarely meet expectations. In looking to upgrade CRM capabilities marketers have to assess the incremental lift of improved data mining versus the incremental cost and total ownership costs of systems or software.
As more and more marketers hunker down, look for inventive uses of the tactics that work. And keep an eye out for wacky experiments to try to break through to new audiences or to road test emerging channels.























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