No, seriously, bear with me. In Fast fixes for B2B marketing in a sour economy on the B2B Web Strategy Blog, author Bill Gadless says that in a downturn, leads are harder to come by and taking noticeably longer to close. So it’s time to take a critical look at your marketing and fix some of those deficiencies that could safely be ignored in the good times. Five specific ideas are highlighted (including why you might think about trying snail mail again), and there’s a link to a much more in-depth discussion on MarketingSherpa, if you’re really captivated by the theme.

I’ve gone back to an article which is a few months old today, because it might give you some inspiration if you’re wondering whether to invest in your website in the current economic climate (or it might give you some ammunition if you’re trying to persuade someone to let you). In How a Website Makeover Can Help “Recession-Proof” Your Company on the B2B Web Strategy blog, the author argues that in a downturn, “even if you don’t aim for market share growth, you’re likely to find that you need more leads to produce each closed deal. That makes it a very dubious proposition to shrink funding for the marketing activities that produce those leads.”

Worth a read.

There’s a whole consultancy industry called “search engine optimisation”, or SEO, which has built up around the understandable desire of companies to “get us to number one on Google” (to which I say: “number one for what, precisely?”). And the most frustrating thing for most of these consultancies appears to be the inclination of clients to just ask them to do all the “technical stuff with the code”. That’s a relatively easy piece in the jigsaw, but it’s not going to get significant results on its own, and so often, the consultancy exercise is considered a disappointment.

Another activity is essential: link building. This appears less technical, and clients are less likely to want to pay consultancies to do this. That’s all very well, if they actually do go ahead and do it themselves. But they rarely do, as Link Building and SEO: Time to Get Back to Basics? in the B2B Web Strategy blog explains. Don’t you hate it when customers only let you do half the job, when you know you could do so much better for them? Don’t fall into the same trap.