In rough economic times, businesses are looking for innovative ways to slash their budget without stifling forward momentum. In this article, I hope to make a compelling argument to suggest that now is the time to reevaluate and redevelop your web presence, and that marketing via the web is the most cost effective way to stay on budget while maintaining growth.

Cutting the Budget

Well, you’ve probably noticed that the economy has hit a bit of a rough spot. Companies are being forced to close their doors or lay off large parts of their workforce, and consumers are hesitant to spend any money on non-essentials. As a result, executives are focusing on their bottom line, and rightfully so.

It seems that, in many cases, one of the first departments to suffer massive cuts is the marketing team. Whether the company has an in-house marketing department or subcontracts to a separate firm, marketing has a way of ending up on the chopping block when it comes time to cut costs. While a strategy that involves slashing the marketing budget may be necessary in the short term, it can be detrimental to the long term viability of the company. An alternative, cost-effective plan for marketing and brand development needs to be implemented. This is where your web presence should come into play.

When compared to television, print ads, or other traditional PR and marketing efforts, the web not only offers the most exposure per dollar*, but it also lends itself to a level of customization and reporting that is simply unrivaled. Not only can you specifically target key demographics by geographic location, age, and interests, you can also fine tune your daily, weekly, and monthly ad budget as you see fit. Additionally, ad networks such as Google Adsense ensure that you only pay when a user actually clicks on your ad. Finally, you can report in realtime on how different ads are performing in terms of actual generated traffic, rather than simply releasing your ad campaign into the wild and never hearing from it again.

That being said, the key to a web presence development campaign doesn’t lie exclusively in online advertising. The goal is to install a sense of brand awareness in your potential customers, and recent innovations in web technology (”web 2.0″) have generated a slew of new, creative, and cost effective ways to meet that goal.

*originally I had outlined a real-numbers scenario of advertising in the NY Times website vs. print edition, but the article got too bogged down in numbers and started to run a bit off topic. I will provide the information if requested, or in another article.

Web Site vs. Web Presence

Typically, I tend to speak about a company’s “web presence” instead of their “web site”. The reason for this change in terminology is the following: simply having a website no longer affords you a competitive edge in your market – everyone has a website, and yours probably isn’t very special. In fact, it’s probably little more than an online business card or, at best, a brochure. And while the “business card” type of site worked well five or eight years ago, it is, to put it mildly, a suboptimal way of delivering your online presence in 2009.

The “web 2.0″ explosion of innovative, intuitive, and engaging websites marked a shift in the way people use the web, and how they view websites. Visitors have come to fundamentally expect clean, professional design, engaging content, and multimedia capabilities (especially video). Blogs, RSS feeds, and aggregate news and press release sites have made fresh, even up-to-the minute content the de facto standard across the Internet. Do you have a news section on your website? When is the last entry from? It’s 2009: stagnant content just doesn’t cut it anymore. And if your competitors have already caught on to the changing Internet, where does that leave you?

Before I outline solutions for these web presence woes, I’d like to briefly outline how companies have gotten into the habit of unknowingly stifling their web presence, and why it continues to happen.

An Antiquated Development Cycle

An all too common way of having a website developed is to find a web design firm, give them a general outline of what you want on the site, and have them provide a design idea. Quite often, the initial design is the final design, or is a very close approximation thereof. You provide some content, they build the site, and it launches.

What’s wrong with this picture?

For starters, the people who have developed your company brand (generally your marketing department/firm) had little involvement in what went on to deploy the site.  Oftentimes, the marketing team is involved in the periphery of the site development, but most of the decision making is ultimately done by the web design company – a company that most likely has only a passing understanding of your brand.

Second, what about this whole web 2.0 thing? Maybe you’ve heard about it, but don’t really have a grasp on what it means. Some people use “Web 2.0″ as an empty buzzword, but the fact of the matter is that whatever you call it, the Internet is a different entity than it was as recently as 1 or 2 years ago. Visitors expect engaging content. They expect multimedia, and they expect an opportunity to interact.

Finally, your web design company may have touched on SEO, or search engine optimization. Maybe they asked you for a few keywords for the meta tags to help your Google ranking, but it didn’t go much further than that. Now, there is crossover between SEO and site development, but ultimately SEO is an entirely separate process, and needs to be budgeted for and managed accordingly.

Bringing your Brand to the Web

The first thing to do when redeveloping your web presence is to put your marketing department (or outside marketing/branding firm) in the driver’s seat. Your web developers should take direction directly from the people who know your brand the best, and should work symbiotically to deliver something unique to your company, packed with engaging content and stable, robust functionality. When someone visits your website, you have an immediate opportunity to make an impression. All too often, companies view their own website from the perspective of someone who already knows who they are and what they do. However, what you really want is for your website to act not only as an informational resource, but as a marketing tool and a direct line from you to your potential customers.

Now, what about web 2.0? One of the flagship changes during the web 2.0 shift was the introduction of social & professional networking via sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Youtube. Even if none of those sites are a good fit your specific marketing campaign or business model, the concepts and opportunities introduced by the new “You”-oriented web are an essential part of modern brand development, and you need to use them to your advantage. Additionally, aggregate news and article sites such as Digg and  Reddit provide the realtime heartbeat of the web. These are the sites that keep the world up to date, and provide a direct line to the masses. Digg will receive half a million unique page views today, and you can rest assured that this article will be posted (for free no less). Where did you post your last press release?

Finally, let’s talk search engine optimization, or SEO. I previously posted an article that offered an introduction to SEO, which you can read by clicking here . In a nutshell, SEO is the process of making sure that your site appears high in the list of search results for specific keywords or phrases. I outlined the process in the other article, so here I would like to discuss another part of optimization that’s not necessarily “search engine” optimization, but is nevertheless an integral part of maintaining a healthy conversion rate.

The optimization I’m talking of can be referred to as site optimization, goal funneling, or conversion optimization. Either way, the idea is simple: whenever someone – anyone – visits your site, you have an ideal goal in mind as far as what you’d like them to do. For an online store, the goal is the sale of a product. For companies who don’t sell goods or services directly online, the goal may not be so cut and dry, but it can just as easily be identified and monetized. Despite the fact that the definition of a “conversion” may not simply be the sale of a product for many websites, we can still direct our visitors toward an end goal, assign monetary worth to actions on the site that direct them toward that goal, and ultimately report on the actual value of the company’s web presence in dollars and cents. For example, it may be the case that someone filling out a contact form to speak with a sales representative is your ideal endpoint for a site visit. You need to first make sure that your website is tailored so that people are properly directed (or “funneled”) into the end goal, then assign a value – again in dollars and cents – of what the sales lead is worth to you. At the end of the month, you can generate a report that will tell you what your web presence has done for your bottom line.

How does this relate to my current budget problems?

The processes I outlined above aren’t free, and can actually become quite expensive depending on the extent of the project. However, it is difficult to make a case for other avenues of marketing and brand development being more cost effective than web presence redevelopment. People are spending more time on the web than any other medium – IBM reported that 19% of Americans spend 6+ hours per day on the web, with only 9% spending that much time watching television. We are a Google culture. People go to Google first – not second or third – when they’re in need of a product or service. Search Engine Watch is currently reporting that Google performs 91 million searches per day. How many of those are for a service your company could be providing?

The economy will eventually get better, and when the dust settles, you don’t want to rub your eyes only to realize that economic panic has stifled your company’s growth beyond repair. Balance is the key – spending enough to keep forward momentum without breaking the bank – and the web is your ticket to finding that balance.