How to accomplish software marketing in an economic downturn – Inbound Marketing

I regularly follow a blog called the Inbound Internet Marketing Blog published by a company called HubSpot.  Inbound marketing is the type of marketing where you are attracting customers to you rather than having to go out and get customers.  The Inbound Marketing Blog often has interesting articles on tactics and topics that can help all marketers increase the traffic to their sales department.

As the news of our economic hardship has been all over the TV and internet, I've been thinking a lot about how to continue our marketing efforts - especially as it's going to be harder and harder for businesses to spend money.  Hubspot had some great suggestions that I think are very valuable - here is an excerpt from their post:


"R.I.P Good Times"
That was the message from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital last week. In a slide show it presented to its portfolio company CEOs, it documented the roots of our current economic problems, the outlook for recovery and advised caution.

For marketers, the most chilling piece of the Sequoia presentation is a slide on the advertising market. They show the total U.S. market beginning to shrink and growth of online advertising beginning to slow.


Sequoia's advertising numbers say more about ADVERTISING than they do about MARKETING. Companies are not marketing LESS, they're just finding ways to market BETTER.
If you pull a Chicken Little, assume the sky is falling and retreat from marketing, you will be devoured by competition that figures out how to market more efficiently.

Specifically, we're doing three things:
(1) Creating More, Better Content -- The economy isn't going to slow down our content production -- it's just going to force us to get more rigorous about assessing the content we create. We're going to do a better job of creating content that engages people, helps us get found, and interests qualified customers. We're also going to rethink the way we organize our content.

If you want to read the other 2 things Hubspot is doing to increase their inbound marketing, you can read the entire article here.