Thomas Jefferson said "The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time."
So, let’s take stock, the big corporate are un-bundeling leaving holes in markets everywhere. But your marketing budget is under pressure, what do you do?
Well it just so happens that all this social network marketing is booming, to put it mildly, at exactly the same time that markets are opening for the smaller guys, for the first time ever there are more new opportunities and new markets than there are products to saturate them.
Therefore social network marketing is both cheap and effective.
For the first time we have a marketing tool that is good at many-to-many and at one-to-many (broadcast) marketing. And it’s not just good… it’s better than anything else at both! I highly recommend this talk on TED by Clay Shirky.
If you are not convinced how about these predictions from analysts?:
1. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2009 - eMarketer’s David Hallerman - Senior Analyst, Dec 16 2008
"[On-line] Video ad spending will run counter to overall economic developments, rising by 45% in 2009 to reach $850 million… Search marketing spending will grow by 14.9% in 2009, to $12.3 billion. Search marketing is not recession-proof, but it is recession-resistant… Total US Internet ad spending will increase to $25.7 billion in 2009, an 8.9% growth rate. That will be the lowest year-over-year increase for on-line advertising ever. Yet it will still be a robust increase compared with nearly all other media."
2. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2009 - eMarketer’s Jeffrey Grau - Senior Analyst, Dec 16 2008
"US retail e-commerce sales: $153,8 billion - 8.0% growth in 2010. $168,4 billion - 9,5% growth in 2011. $183.9 billion - 9.2% growth in 2012. Excluding travel, digital downloads and event tickets."
3. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2009 - eMarketer’s Carol Krol - Senior Analyst, Dec 16 2008
"eMarketer estimates that US TV ad spending will decline 4.2% to $66.9 billion in 2009."
4. The Future of Bandwidth - Suzy Frisch, Oct 2008
"The escalating need for bandwidth is readily apparent at Qwest Communications. The provider has seen “explosive growth” as client traffic on its networks doubles every 15 months,"
5. Consumer Internet Predictions for 2009 - Lightspeed, Dec 11 2008
"To people who do not spend time on social networks, it seems crazy that people would pay real money to buy each other virtual gifts - pictures of things ranging from birthday cakes to hugging penguins - and then display them on their profile pages. But estimates peg Facebook’s digital gifts sales in the $35 million – 50 million range this year. As more human interaction moves on-line, these social tokens of appreciation move on-line in parallel."
6. eMarketer: Top 10 Predictions for 2009 - eMarketer, 2008
"[Internet] Search Marketing Remains Recession-Resistant: While search marketing is not recession-proof, it is recession-resistant, with estimated spending growth in 2009 at 14.9%, to $12.3 billion… Video ad spending growth will run counter to overall economic developments, rising by 45% in 2009 to reach $850 million."
7. Trendspotting, 2008/9
"2009 total U.S. advertising will decrease 10.0% to $252.1 billion , U.S. Internet advertising revenue will grow 6.1% to $28.3 billion, 4% growth in Display, 20% growth in Search."
I don’t think there has ever been a better time to build a brand than right now… well that’s not entirely true; yesterday was a better time.
So what do you need? A static website just won’t cut it, in an acronym you need CMS, next…
