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2009 New Year New Web Site

Tuesday, 13 January 2009

Short Term Loss vs Long Term Gain..

Following on from our December post we have seen the exponential growth of online sales through the key xmas and boxing day sales periods. Contrastly the high street has experienced the pain we have all predicted.

Many brand names such Woolworths, Morgan, Wedgewood, Adams have gone and we are told that there are atleast another 11 that are in a critical state and will be lucky to survive January never mind 2009.

As an advertising agency we are seeing 2 very different client approaches to the current market place. There are the savers and the spenders. Many companies have decimated their marketing budgets for the first quarter believing there to be little market appetite for products and services. They are adopting the approach if there is a weak market then why bother chasing it, lets wait it out and spend the budget when the market is more bouyant.

This is not as pessimistic as it would appear at first glance. If it is a private business with a healthy cash flow and balance sheet then a 'keeping your powder dry' approach has its merits. If there are going to be further casulaties in the sector then why not wait and then obtain a larger slice of the remaining cake.

However companies assuming that the cake will just be for offline once the economy recovers are sorely mistaken. The retail landscape has changed and it will not revert back to its original format. This is not a blip; it is a change in consumer confidence and behaviour. Retail has always been good at giving the customer what he wants in their stores but have been really slow to appreciate the new generation really do like on line and many now know other form of retail therapy.

With this in mind I have been campaigning the WL client base to look at its on line proposition now and not when its simply too late. This is not an area to hold back on in quarter 1 2009.

We always brief clients that a validated new web site built correctly to meet all criteria should be given a lead time of atleast 10 weeks. This is before we try to get the site optimised and appearing high in the search engines which is a long term initiative.

If clients think that by holding off investment into on line until quarter 2 will influence their companys' 2009 bottom line then they are correct but probably not with the result they would desire. If we accept the first 2 paragraphs of this blog then we are accepting that the earliest companies will have their on line proposition operational will be for Quarter 3 ( and appearing up the search engines could be well into 2010). This will lead to a need for expensive pay per click campaigns to gain market share.

My advice is to by all means pull back on the above the line traditonal media activity in these uncertain times but balance this with real investment into digital marketing to give an immediate return and a real platform to tackle the second half of 2009 when' if we believe the experts, we will have a market to attack.

By waiting for the market to return to health companies run the risk of actually accelerating their demise as their key competitors use this turbulent period to re-group AND rebuild in readiness.

Anybody who would like to take advantage of a free health check on their digital offering then please do get in touch.

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