I know – we’re in a recession and layoffs are a-plenty. You’re collecting unemployment and cashing in your 401(k)s. If you DO still have a company, the last thing you want to consider is yet another place to invest your money. Who knows if it’s a good idea? Will there be any money to be made by going the internet route?

The interesting thing is that a recession is actually a great time to invest in internet marketing. SEO takes a little bit of time, and you do have time right now. By the time the economy recovers (and it will, in time — everything is cyclical, if you remember your Econ 101 classes), you want to have your company firmly situated within the internet community.

If you talk about this from a Zen perspective, waning times are times of reorder, regrouping, and cleaning up. It’s a great time to reassess your company and strategize new methods. After all, you don’t want to be behind the curve when people are ready to buy again.

HubSpot had a great blog article about this the other day — about why this is the perfect time to get into the Internet Marketing game:

• Be Where People are Looking. Inbound vs. Outbound. The internet is primarily an “inbound” marketing channel where you “pull” prospects to you, by being where they are looking for your solution. The internet can deliver sales ready leads.  If they are looking for your solution, your sales cycle will naturally be shorter.
• Spend Time. Not Money. Almost all internet marketing strategies require more of your time and less of your money compared to traditional marketing and advertising solutions.
• Everything is Measurable. You can test everything. Some people get a little carried away with measuring every move. Not every connection on a social network, every email blast you send or every blog post you write, etc is going to turn into business. But, when your online marketing activities turn into leads, opportunities and sales, you will know exactly what activity to do again.
• Your Competitors are Shifting Their Spending. According to eMarketer, more will be spent on online marketing and shifted from traditional marketing approaches as a result of the “R” word. (IAB too.) Can you afford not to be where your competitors are?
• Constant Improvement. If you’re doing the same thing you did to advertise and market your business as you did 25 years ago, you have a problem. Your problem is not that you’re still wearing bell-bottomed nylon suits. It’s that you probably don’t know what’s working and what’s not working. (See #3 above.) Measurability has a really interesting side effect. Since you can now measure things, you can now improve. I’m not talking about tweaking colors and copy. I’m talking about walking into the CFOs office and showing how you delivered more opportunities to the sales team on a smaller budget.
• Prepare for the future. It’s hard to argue with the statement that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong”. Ok, it isn’t hard to argue with that. But, much more experienced marketers than I have proven that investing in down times is the surest way to capitalize on good times:

When times are tough it is time to invest, not cut. This comes from years of research dating back to Ogilvy’s Alex Biel and Millward Brown interaction surveys. All show that, if we cut marketing during such times, the impact is damaging and it can take you longer to get back to where you were.

Of course, this is easy to say, but harder to do. The Pavlovian reaction is to cut, but the media industry can learn from someone like Rupert Murdoch, who historically has never done that. You’ll see him investing in editorial and products at a time when other people are throwing the baby out with the bath water. The talk to do ratio is high, the doing is low.

So take a look at your company — or if you’re starting a new venture, take a closer look — to see where your money’s going to be better spent during this time. Setting up your site, working on driving traffic to it, and working on being an expert in your field by blogging, and doing it all while things are slower, are all going to position you in a great place once the economy rebounds.

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