After more and more evidence that an economic downturn is coming, marketing departments and firms everywhere are bracing for a hit. Marketing has historically been on the receiving end of lay offs once a recession kicks in, but will this ring true for those in search engine marketing? Withstanding the dot com bust, SEM has yet to be a part of a major, all-encompassing economic recession. We think SEM is well positioned to vis a vis any inclement economic weather, and here are 5 reasons why SEM may avoid the traditional marketing guillotine.

5. Before anything gets cut it gets analyzed
Traditional marketing, in terms of advertising, is heavily influenced by reach, which is not as scalable as some of today’s search engine tactics. When measuring marketing’s effectiveness during a recession, decisions are prudently based on ROI. With traditional advertising’s reach being affected by newer technology such as Tivo, and even cell phones, advertisers are now forced to look for new and economically viable ways of distributing their message. With its on-demand results and completely measurable analytics, paid search certainly falls into an area of marketing where ROI can easily be distinguished.

4. A Plethora of poisons
Paid and natural search are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEM today. Right now the trend seems to be dipping your feet into social media before diving into PPC or SEO. Finding a way to implement accounts on any social media site (Digg, Facebook, Myspace, You Tube, etc) that can get your name out there in a controlled, viral environment is a great way to reach large audiences with a small budget. Granted this is all hearsay, social media’s genuine and versatile messages, could be a very effective and low-cost recession-time marketing tool for any company. However waiting until the recession to implement a campaign could be costly. Now is the time to get started, recessions don’t take kindly to stragglers.

3. Timeliness
Implementing traditional marketing is a timely and costly process. Companies know this from the start which is why it is easy to immediately write off marketing. However implementing a paid search campaign typically takes only days or at most weeks, and is an investment that will glean a significant amount of keyword conversion data that will help properly target and focus a natural search campaign even during a recession.

2. Innovation
Recessions usually turn industries into being reactive instead of proactive, but SEM is built around exploiting and utilizing the web’s endless venues. While I doubt we’ll see major ventures like new search engines or pets.com 2.0, sites like howcast.com and hulu.com have the possibility to become major portals for SEM business.

1. Cost
Any way you look at it traditional advertising is more expensive than SEM. However that raises the question– will the recession raise the cost of SEM and finally make it a part of traditional advertising? If so this entire post could be bunk, it could also be bunk as of right now. No one knows how a recession could affect SEM because SEM has never been affected by a recession, but if you look at the overwhelming evidence of both its increase in use and effectiveness, it’s easy to see why it could be one of marketing’s best allies when trying to stave off the R word.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 2:22 pm by cobo and is filed under Apogee Press, Blogging, E-Commerce, Natural Search (SEO), Paid Search (PPC), SEM Tools, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.