Financial Crisis – What you can do about it for advertising

Before you read on, we want to point out that this article cost us nothing other than time. We didn’t put a single half million dollar ad in a print media magazine, nor did we place a massive spend on TV. Using a mixture of putting proper content along with related keywords have provided an outlet for you to see exactly how this works.

You are reading this, you visited our site, you heard our pitch and learned of a social media advertising agency and the benefits of social media optimization and search engine optimization and we paid nothing for you to see it. Now for the article:

We all are painfully aware of what is happening around us. Banks have virtually halted lending to businesses and individuals.

This is a disaster of epic proportions for many companies. This credit crunch is forcing many changes within the workplace to extreme levels.

Companies are not getting simple things such as bridge loans to cover payroll between when work is done, client is invoiced and the check comes in. On a larger scale many companies are not getting the millions they need to retool their factories, and perhaps on the biggest scale, we have entire countries not lending to other countries.

You cannot have a modern economy without banks. Period.

When the .com crash occurred in late 2000 though 2002, the disaster wrecked havoc within the technology industry, along with the terror attacks brought along a very bad day for many of us.

That was a very difficult time….. however… this is much worse financially speaking.

No doubt that many in the Advertising and marketing world are facing some extreme choices. Do we advertise or not? Is there a chance we can gain market share if we push now when our competitor is cutting back?

The answer honestly depends on how you market and advertise.

For a Time Magazine Color Spread ad, you are looking at $511,680 … literally over 1/2 a million dollars, for a single ad.

The definition of cutting back according to Time would be to move from the color spread ad to a color page ad, running at $ 255,840 .. over a quarter million dollars.

A fairly massive Social Media campaign sustained over the course of literally years would be a fraction of the cost of either ad… that single Time Magazine ad will vanish from the newsstands within 4 weeks. The social media campaign will go throughout the entire recession, have a global reach and a growing reach.

A successful social media campaign will deliver decent levels of traffic… and if highly successful.. repeatedly hit those people over and over again.

Meaning that with our social media campaign (this is based on real figures from a recent and ongoing social media campaign) using very little resources and no marketing dollars, we have seen 11,800,894 page views 3,153,477 unique visitors 2,950,772 first time unique visitors and 202,705 multiple “come back” visitors.

Well let’s really do the math.

We paid 8 dollars that year for the domain name.
We paid 5 dollars a month for a simple shared hosting account (that we had to upgrade due to traffic)
We did however put much time into it.

We are going to waive the production costs for this example because the chances are they will cancel each other out when all is said and done.

Total hard costs: $68
Sweat Time : 12 months
Total visitors : 3,153,477
Cost per visitor : ~$0.00002

Time Magazine Ad: $511,680
Sweat Time : 2 month
Total viewers : 19,500,000
Cost per visitor: ~$0.03

~$0.00002 vs ~$0.03

You do the math.

During a nasty recession your options are limited. Most companies do not have the budget in 2009 that they had in 2008. Advertising Agencies and Marketing Agencies are taking it the most behind the auto industry and banking.

The focus moves more towards ROI from branding, and as credit continues to be tight.. that ROI must be delivered at the lowest possible cost.

Basically, you need to do whatever is necessary to keep your company afloat, your job secure and your investment sending back a positive ROI.

That isn’t going to come from 1/2 million dollar ad spend for a single ad.

It’s why we are growing in a recession. The cost is dramatically lower yet the ROI is dramatically higher.

Remember, we were comparing a full year worth of advertising vs a single ad. If anything it’s well worth the risk.. you have very little to lose, yet the upside may be quite dramatic.