Increasing Your Advertising During A Recession Really Works

Back in April 2008, I wrote a blog about how entrepreneurs can beat the recession. My very first point in that article was to increase your marketing efforts - something that has been reiterated over and over again by business experts. Well, I practiced what I preached and it worked!

I had every indication that this past November and December would be extremely slow months for my company. Despite this, they turned out to be extremely profitable months and December turned out to be the best December my company has had in the past 8 years.

My strategy was to blitz my existing and potential customers with tons of helpful tips and advice so that they would see me as a dependable resource. This, in turn, would encourage them to buy into my services. My goal, specifically, was to increase transactions for my BlackPR.com, BlackExperts.com, and BlackSpeakers.com services.

Here's a list of the top 10 things I did:

1) Attended, networked, and had a booth at Black Enterprise's conference in Charlotte, FraserNet's conference in Atlanta, and the Diversity Business conference in Orlando.

2) Attended, networked, and spoke as a panelist at the African American Internet conference in Chicago, at the Turning Point Urban Business Summit in Los Angeles, and at the Junior Black Chamber of Commerce National Conference in Los Angeles.

3) Attended and spoke as a keynote speaker at the Booker T. Washington Economic Development Summit in Tuskegee, Alabama.

4) Increased my budgets allocated to online advertising through Google Adsense, Yahoo Marketing, and Adbrite.

5) Sent out direct marketing postcards to all 3,000 of my previous and existing clients - encouraging them to use our services again.

6) Started emailing all of my clients to encourage them to use our services more frequently.

7) Created a list of influential people, and started sending them our company press releases on a bi-weekly basis.

8) Started reaching out to my biggest clients to create a personal relationship with them. I even met with some of them and took them to lunch.

9) Started blogging more frequently on DanteLee.com

10) Created a Twitter account (www.twitter.com/DanteLee) and started using it on a daily basis.

As you can probably suspect, I had to spend quite a bit of money and time for each and everyone of these things. But it was well worth it. Not only did I make a 400% return on what I invested, but I ended up with more than 120 new clients.

All those conferences back-to-back worked extremely well; This was where we recruited a lot of our new clients. The other strategies helped a lot with branding and turning existing followers into paying customers. For instance, I was successfully able to convince the majority of the people who follow this blog to buy into my services.

Take my word: When the economy is bad, increase your marketing activity. It really does work!