When every news report warns of global doom and gloom, the business owner’s first instinct is to cut all extraneous costs. You run your production team lean, run your sales force lean, and everything else goes into the deep freeze. Too many people see marketing as something irrelevant, as vague feel-good fluff that neither makes the product nor closes the sale. That’s crazy talk.

When the sales pipeline is running dry, or at least no longer gushing, it’s marketing that fills that pipeline, and even in lean times, targeted efforts can keep your name out in the marketplace and create a conversation (and hey, maybe even hype). This shows you’re a thriving player, not one of many recessionary casualties, and prepares potential customers for the closing move your sales team will execute.We’ve come up with ideas for marketing yourself through the latest social media and the old-fashioned general Internet:

Social Media Optimization:

1. Are you on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and other social media sites? If not (or if so, and you’re overwhelmed with all of it), you may want a Social Media Optimization (SMO) expert to put your message into the newest and fastest-growing Internet arena. Have them create a Facebook or LinkedIn group for your company and invite your users; every one of their friends will see that they are related to your company and there is just nothing better than that for word-of-mouth.

2. Keep that SMO expert onboard to troll conversation on Twitter about your company and your industry, so they can send responses and begin threads. Use Google Alerts to be notified when terms relevant to your business are mentioned.

3. Other social media your expert can monitor: Forum and blog commenting, LinkedIn and Yahoo Answers, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Get Satisfaction.

4. Launch video tutorials for your website. In addition post them to YouTube. Hire a personable, well-spoken provider to help you convert your script to a professional-looking online video using tools like Camtasia or Snapz.

5. Get a blogger to maintain a company blog and to reach out to other blogs to keep your message in the conversation.

6. Do you have a community forum on your website? When users post questions, are they getting an answer? Bring in a moderator for your community forum to make sure that when users take the time to post a comment, they get a response that will encourage them to come back.

7. Hire a writer to create articles relevant to your industry and syndicate them to Squidoo, Business.com and EzineArticles.com.

8. Get a writer with exceptional PowerPoint skills to prepare a presentation that is highly relevant to your industry, and post it on SlideShare.com.
9. Recruit an analyst to prepare a few charts and data about your company and business.

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