Advertising in a Recession: Help, My Marketing Budget Was Cut!
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Written By Noah Mallin | May 14, 2009 | Share This
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This recession-oriented post comes out of a discussion I had with some colleagues earlier in the week. The talk was prompted by the story that as part of their government backed bankruptcy the Obama administration has cut Chrysler’s marketing budget in half. For marketers like us, that’s like watching a limb get severed. Still, whether government mandated or not, it’s a reality that many businesses are scaling back on advertising and marketing just when they need it the most.
Naturally our default position is that a recession is when you want to hike your marketing budget. We do want to get paid after all. More seriously though there is plenty of evidence that brands that ramp up their marketing spend in a downturn emerge on or near the top of their industry segments when the recovery starts (I highly recommend this New Yorker article for a more in depth view of how this works. Yes, the New Yorker.)
When brands can’t or won’t spend more however, how do you make the most of what you’ve got? In other words, what if you were a marketing exec and you were told that your budget was halved?
We all agreed that after throwing up, we would naturally preserve search and social media. You were expecting billboards? It wasn’t simply self-interest that motivated this decision though. We all knew from experience that it is the most cost-effective, information-rich way to target consumers and understand what they are most interested in.
I quickly parried by asking what other form of advertising we each would keep in addition to search and social media.
Television ads are expensive to produce and to buy - but they still reach a greater number of people at one time than any other medium. So let’s discard print then, right? Not so fast – though TV has a broad reach, numerous studies have shown that consumers are more apt to take note of print ads. This is especially so in the age of DVRs which allow viewers to fast-forward through commercial breaks. Plus print is getting ever cheaper as the magazine and newspaper industries continue to decline.
What we kept coming back to is that whichever medium you choose to accompany it, search and social media helps to make the additional channel more effective.
When it comes to television you have viewers who are stimulated to act by what they have just seen on the tube. They are likely to do a search on the product or brand or turn to social media sites to discover more information. If you run a sophisticated search campaign tied to closely to your television spots you can scoop up the consumers most likely to buy and send them straight to your website or even down to the nearest store to seal the deal.
In addition you can make that TV spot do double duty by socializing it across video sharing platforms and even using outtakes and alternate content to give bloggers something special. Meanwhile, you can find out where your ads have had the most impact geographically and what times of days they were most effective using the data you glean from your search analytics.
Print advertising benefits from search and social media too. More and more print organizations are adding social media to their menus. If you are already targeting their readers offline, why not do so online as well. Did your ad in O Magazine have an impact? Find out by asking people in Oprah’s Twitter stream or her Facebook fan page.
Just because a magazine claims to attract a certain demographic doesn’t mean that they do, or that they are responding to your print ad. You can find out how effective your ad copy is by buying keywords based on the ads, that only users who have seen the print ads are likely to use – (ie Acme buttons print ad featuring Sammy the Button Maker – you would want to buy the “Sammy the Button Maker” keyword). You might vary the terms for different magazines, allowing for insight into geographic impact. To top it off you could set up a landing page that asks users to choose from amongst different products or product configurations, which affords greater insight into the preference of each publication’s readers.
In a recession it’s important to get as much out of each effort as possible. Using search and social media to spend more wisely on other platforms will make that marketing dollar go farther than ever before.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Media Convergence, Online Video, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Social Media, Technology, Web Analytics |
There is one point you have missed. When the marketing budget is cut then there is less to spend all around. How do you choose where to cut? Equally? Sounds very mechanical.
Measurement of web statistics hence returns is easier than in TV, Print, Radio. There is a large element of arbitrariness in the decision making of cutting down on certain sectors.