Its happening everywhere. Stocks are on the decline, earnings reports are bad, people are being laid off and this is all in big business. So your thinking to yourself how can I possibly weather this economic storm if I’m a small or medium size business without the huge resources of larger companies?

What most news articles and reports don’t mention is that even in the face of cutbacks to marketing budgets most companies turn to online marketing as an efficient and economical way of advertising, generating leads, and driving new sales to their business.

Online marketing can take many different forms, and can mean different things to different business’s. The important thing to understand is that in tough times its the best possible solution you may have to increasing sales even in a tough economy.

So why should you invest in online marketing?

Online marketing not only provides your business the ability to efficiently and effectively target you advertising efforts to specifics groups, it also provides you the ability to maximize your ROI and adjust your approach in almost real time. The reason why many large companies increase their online marketing budgets in tough times is because they are able to analyze what they are spending down to the smallest detail and can tell whether its working very quickly.

Direct Mail and other forms of traditional marketing simply cant offer that. You can mail out 10000 flyer’s and hope the most people look at them before they throw it away and some people actually respond, but its really hit or miss. Turn to email marketing however and now you can target 10000 people via email, know that your email will end up in their inbox, understand exactly how many people took the time to view, know if they actually clicked through to your site, and track them through every point of the transaction. Not to mention its a fraction of the cost of direct mail and you can adjust and target your campaign overnight not weeks later.

This is just one example of how online marketing can recession proof your marketing iniatives. The list goes on from Paid Search Listings, Local Optimization, and website enhancements that can all drive more sales, leads, business, or traffic to your site with the ability to track every detail.

Corporations discovered the advantages of these techniques a long time ago, now small and medium business is getting into the game and if you have considered it yet I seriously suggest you take another look.

It could be the difference between weathering the economy and growing your busines, or getting beaten down by the economic storm.

I recently signed on as the Sales Director for a start-up SEO Firm. My expertise is reputation management and I wanted to share my experiences about building our services from the ground up. Amazingly even in L.A. word of mouth marketing has worked very well for us. Just attending a few chamber of commerce events in the surrounding cities has been quite successful. And I have noticed a growing trend. Initially the calls coming in were the standard repair and management for small to mid-size companies such as night clubs, restaurants, law firms, accounting agencies and the like. However now I find myself inundated with preparing preliminary reputation audits for c-level executives, plastic surgeons, attorneys and accountants. I know this is nothing new but I didn’t expect the majority of our new reputation management business to be so heavily targeted from individuals. I really thought this would come later but word seems to get around town quickly. Even older executives are very interested in discussing RM. At first they don’t fully accept the idea but when I present them with an audit the look on their face let’s you know they now “get it.”

One particular instance was with an attorney who just so happened to have the exact same name as a convicted sex offender! Needless to say when I started the audit I had no where I was headed but this pales in comparison to his reaction once I presented my findings. He had absolutely no idea this guy existed but wanted to put as much distance between himself and the convict as possible. This of course got me to thinking, “What if you less than reputable family members that share your last name?” Obviously this could affect you. Even misspelled names that almost match up to yours or (more recently) one CPA in L.A. with an absolutely horrible online presence and another CPA with the exact same name whose firm is less than 20 miles from the other! The world’s a small place, much smaller now with social marketing; if you don’t take care of your good name no one will.

*Note to my potential reputation management clients.

Ethics

I will only take you on as a client if you are in fact committed to bettering your online and offline business practices. If you’ve made mistakes and offended your clients I understand. We all drop the ball. But I will not put out the fires, engage your clients, post your press release, optimize your site or participate in your blogs if you intend on continuing shady business practices. Even the best and the brightest have their bad days but risking my reputation by lying about yours is something I will never do.

Christian C

I recently attended a dinner and encountered a situation in which I realized just how important reputation management for teenagers and young adults might be.  The hosts of the party are long time family friends and both are local politicians. The husband is state Congressman and the wife a local Supreme Court judge. However it is their daughter, who was recently accepted to Vassar that is the point of mention here. I was talking with her and of course we went through the standard, “Have you decided on a major?” and she explained that she’s always loved history and political science and she intends on following in her parent’s political footsteps. And that’s when it hit me. I said,” Of course you know that’s really going to put you in the public eye.” She replied, “Oh yes, but I’ve had experience with that all my life and actually really enjoy it.” I told her, “What I mean is, is there anything out ‘there’ that you wouldn’t want associated with your character?” She looked at me as if I was trying to provoke her but I retreated and explained what it is I do for a living. I simply followed up with, “Do you have a MySpace page?” She gleamed and said, “Of course!” and proceeded to tell me the wild times she and her girlfriends had at the beach recently. Shortly thereafter you could tell that she finally caught on to what I was getting at…

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Your company has experienced incredible growth over the last decade due to the incredible increase in connectivity and information sharing abilities of the internet.  Your online sales have increased, your overall growth has increased, but at the same time your finding it increasingly difficult to manage customer satisfaction both off and online. While offline customer satisfaction has more of a one to one experience its the online portion that’s really got you worried.

You see, in the online world, its not really a one to one relationship. Rather, one unsatisfied customer can translate into a wave of criticism, negative press, blog posts, forum comments, and much more that can not only hurt your company’s reputation but also hurt your pocket book.

Lets face it, the internet has presented you with huge opportunities and potential for your business that you never imagined but at the same time you worried because managing your brand, customer satisfaction, and your reputation is a whole new animal online.

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Customer: “How can I get higher placement in search engines?”

“Really pay attention to the words you are using to define your brand. Get creative, I mean you’ll never rank with generic keywords such online marketing or local house painters. Also be sure you include words that give your geographic location and don’t forget to include variations of your words since people are always misspelling their searches.

Customer: “Ok I can do that, anything else?”

“Yes, there are about 4 other things you can do. Is your website spider friendly?”

Customer: “I think so but I’m not exactly clear on what that means.”

“Two things; steer clear of Flash, Java, frames and DHTML and most importantly make your site clearly named, easy to navigate with correct HTML and no broken links. By clearly named I mean fixing the file names that your pages use to represent a searchable keyword like Ferrari.com/F40/racing-history. This will allow spiders to more easily navigate your entire site for proper indexing.”

Customer: “Thank you, that helps a lot. Next?”

“Many people believe, as do I, that your TITTLE tag is one of the most important aspects in ranking higher with a search engine’s algorithms. So instead of a tag that reads Bob’s Boat’s put in something along the lines of Bob’s Boats – #1 Boating Super Store in SoCal.

Customer: Actually a friend told me about this so I have done that.”

“Good. The last two aspects you must address are content and incoming links. Obviously the key here is as much content as you possibly can but remember it must still be very clear, concise, easily searchable and maintain keyword density so don’t write jumbled, incoherent content and think it’s going to help because it won’t. It will actually hurt your rankings. Finally, make sure that every site out there that needs to know about you does. Of course stick with industry specific and relevant directories and do not get involved with any link schemes.

Customer: “Got it.”

“Ok, well these 5 tools should give you a good start with helping you achieve higher rankings so good luck.”

Customer: “Thank you so much.”