A lot of people have been asking me recently about how my business has weathered the economic downturn. I haven’t noticed any changes in the number of calls I get and I have two explanations for this:
1) Most of the damage so far has been to publicly traded companies, major corporations, and real-estate related businesses. None of my clients are the Fortune 500 type of client as I deal mostly with small to medium-sized businesses. None of my clients are directly related to real estate either.
2) The economic downturn makes SEO even more important. When things get tight, companies will start looking at where there marketing budgets are going and they’ll start to question the ROI of their offline marketing efforts. How much are these newspaper ads really making us? Are we tracking the ROI on these?
One of the benefits of SEO, Pay-per-click advertising, and online marketing in general is that it’s much easier to track leads, sales, traffic, and ROI. Web stats programs are very accurate, and it’s easy to tell if you’re getting more traffic. Tracking incoming phone calls is still difficult because there’s no way to know what triggered the call (was it a Google AdWords click, an organic click, or a referral from a firend?) but there are ways to track phone calls.
You can put a different number on a website to track calls from online traffic or you can ask your customers when they call how they found your business. If you’re running an AdWords campaign, try doubling your daily spend for 2 weeks and see if your calls go up (as opposed to just your traffic).
What about Yellow Pages?
Online, the major Yellow Pages sites are free, although sites like Google Maps take some work to rank well locally.
Print Advertising?
Running an ad in a newspaper or magazine is basically “interruption marketing” and you can’t hope to target your audience well. Even if you advertise in a niche trade journal, you can’t be sure that everyone who sees the ad actually wants to buy at the moment. With pay-per-click advertising, you get customers on your site only when they are looking for what’s on your site (assuming you write honest, informative ad copy).
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