Recession busting tips
Having your website budget slashed due to the recession is not the time to get despondent; it's time to get creative! Here are our top 5 recession-busting tips.
You don’t need us to tell you that we’re currently in the grip of economic recession. Everybody from small business all the way to the multinational big boys are tightening their belts, cutting their budgets and exercising caution.
With less cash available, we need to get creative and squeeze maximum value from the funds we have. Here are our top 5 recession-busting tips for getting the most out of your new or current website.
1. Know your budget.
Having a clear idea of exactly what you have to spend is vitally important, even more so when money’s tight. When looking for quotes from web agencies try to be as honest as possible, even if you feel you won’t be able to get much for your money. Good web companies will know how to squeeze maximum value from even the smallest of budgets, but we have to know what we’re dealing with to do so.
2. Know your goals.
When money is plentiful, it’s easy to throw money at a website without ever really considering why you need the site in the first place. With a tighter budget, it’s imperative you have simple, clearly defined goals.
What are the current problems faced by your business and your customers? What are your (very specific) goals? Without knowing those, it’s tempting to automatically assume you need a complete re-design. However, with clearer objectives it could be the case that a simpler refresh or rethink is all that’s required to achieve great results.
A simpler re-touch costs less money and yet could achieve greater results than a blanket re-start from scratch.
Solve clear problems rather than blindly planning solutions. Your wallet (or finance department) will thank you for it.
3. Simplify.
A larger budget affords time for the development of lots of features. This is great, of course, but when times are hard there simply isn’t the money to pay for it. This is no bad thing.
Try less features. Removing features not only reduces the overall budget for a website build, but can often make the resulting website quicker to download, easier to read, easier to navigate and use and optimised better for converting paying customers.
Make your core message clearer and strip the site down to focus more tightly on your clear objectives. It’ll cost you less and could actually improve your website in the process.
4. Make use of existing technologies.
There are no shortage of 3rd party web-based services these days which are perfect for handling the heavy lifting that would cost an arm and a leg to custom build yourself. In these recession-hit times it’s important that you use them to your advantage.
- Use Google Apps to provide an entire web-based office environment for your staff (or even customers) with email, calendar and shared documents, Word and Excel.
- Use YouTube to host and display video on your site.
- Use Flickr to handle uploading and displaying imagery.
- Use Upcoming to publicise your company’s events
- Use Meet-up to arrange get-togethers and networking events (we’re especially fond of this one).
- Backpack acts a simple but impressive office intranet with no specialist IT infrastrucutre or skills required.
- Highrise is a brilliant web-based CRM system for keeping track of interactions with customers across your organisation.
- Embed interactive Google Maps of your location into your website, with a postcode driving directions tool.
A good web agency will be able to advise on how to use these existing technologies and implement them in your website, at a fraction of the cost of developing similar bespoke solutions.
5. Spend more wisely.
Sounds obvious, we know, but sometimes it’s not a case of reducing spending so much as spending what you have more wisely. How can you do this? Here are some ideas…
- Prioritise your website budget on having the words written by a professional web copywriter, at the expense of graphic design or whizzy features. (We know a really, really good web copywriter – http://txtoptimisation.co.uk)
- Cut spending in other areas – if offline marketing is becoming ever more expensive and less effective, consider moving marketing 100% online instead.
- Email marketing. Done properly, email marketing can be far more cost-effective, with a far greater ROI than other traditional forms of marketing. See our ‘reasons to use email marketing’ article.
- Social networking – many companies are getting excellent results from using social networking services such as Facebook or Twitter to get closer to and engage their customers. It costs nothing but time and can achieve fantastic results. Dive in and get involved!
In short
A reduced budget doesn’t need to mean that all is lost for your marketing efforts on the web, in fact far from it. Be clear about your budget, be clear about your objectives and keep an open mind to being creative with what’s on offer out there.
Happy recession busting!
What next?
Need any help busting this recession and getting the most from your budget? Give us a call on (01482) 341797 – we’d love to have a chat.
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