Each year, we hear from a handful of clients who wish to decrease their spending during the winter. Most often, it’s due to the overwhelming costs of the holiday season. We want to make sure small business owners are able to enjoy the holidays with their families without stressing about their online advertising, so we’ve put together a guide for cutting back on advertising costs without doing long-term damage. Here’s what you should, and shouldn’t, do when you want to temporarily minimize your Internet marketing expenses.
Definitely…
Create a budgeting plan in advance. If you anticipate difficulty paying for advertising during the winter months—whether it’s due to holidays or your company’s slow season—you can actually plan ahead. Prospect Genius offers flexible financing, so if you’re expecting heavier cash flow during the spring and summer than in the winter, you can pay extra ahead of time. Instead of paying the same amount every month, regardless of your company’s fluctuating profits, you can choose to pay more while you have a surplus and pay less while you’re tightening your belt. For example, if you’re signed up for our $299/month Core program, you could pay $50 extra per month from March through November while you have increased profits, and then you would only have to pay $75 in December and $75 in January. This allows you to keep your online presence strong, prepare for the seasonal increase in demand, and beat out your competition that didn’t made such a wise decision.
Feel Free To…
Pause your pay-per-click campaign (if you have one). This type of advertising program is designed to turn on and off very easily without causing damage to your overall web presence. Because you pay for clicks as they come in, you can choose to stop the campaign, and all that will happen is that you will stop seeing PPC leads and site visits until you resume payment. If you’re serious about decreasing your spending and you don’t mind your business’s leads taking a hit, this measure could really help. We recommend it especially if you provide seasonal services like landscaping or junk hauling, which are naturally slow during the winter. You can save the PPC costs and campaign management fees while only missing out on a small amount of traffic.
Do NOT…
Stop your SEO campaign, under any circumstances. SEO is a lifestyle. Since search engine optimization is an ongoing, strategically tiered and integrated process, it must be kept consistently intact. There is no “pause” button. As SEO providers, we must create, update, and maintain many listings for your business. If we have to take all of your listings down because you stopped your campaign, then your web presence will take an enormous hit. In fact, if you do toy around with your online presence by stopping and starting your SEO, you run the risk of Google perceiving your actions as spam. If that happens, you could be looking at a very long delay before you recover. For example, some people affected by Google’s algorithm update nicknamed “Penguin” took action to rectify their infractions and were left waiting 12 months to find out whether those changes actually worked! All those people just had to sit and wait, hoping that they would recover, because it took Google 12 months to roll out an update to Penguin’s accompanying filter. You don’t want to be like those unfortunate people and put your entire web presence in limbo for a full year just to save money for two or three months.
We’re Here to Help
As our mission statement says, we exist to help small businesses thrive. Our bottom line is your success. We want you to enjoy the holidays without stressing about your company’s advertising budget or compromising your company’s well-being. Please don’t hesitate to call or e-mail us if you’d like to discuss your options for decreasing advertising costs this winter.