My article about marketing through the bad times was published is the local paid daily paper on Tuesday July 14th:

“In these uncertain economic times…”

Are you fed up with hearing that yet? There is nothing uncertain about it; we are in a recession.

So, is it time to chop your marketing budget, or to invest more in marketing to strengthen your claim to the business that is out there to be won?

I am a marketing guy and therefore you can probably guess what my opinion will be. But I do have evidence… honest! At Upstream Connections (the SEO and Internet Marketing company where I work), we have not stopped growing in the last 12 months and let me tell you how: marketing. And, of course, being great at what we do.

The big buzzword of the moment is “engagement” (thank goodness; “synergy” was getting tired) and “engagement” is a great place to start thinking about how to market your company in a recession. On a local level, networking groups are a great way to meet real life human beings and boost your profile. We are repeatedly told that the best kind of engagement is “a conversation with your prospects”. Imagine having a real conversation; that’s what networking groups like the BHCC and CADIA offer.

Digitally, the equivalent is business networking sites like LinkedIn and Ecademy, where you can spread your net much further afield. One great benefit of finding people through these sites is that there is no travelling involved and the time commitment is smaller. The downside is that you often don’t meet your prospect face to face.

By networking, you will make yourself visible to a small batch of people at a time. At Upstream Connections, we firmly believe that you should be visible to as many people as possible, all of the time and Search Engine Optimisation is the best way to make that happen. By ranking well in Google for the searches that reflect your business you give your prospects a quick and easy way to find you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you are worried that your website itself isn’t up to scratch, we provide all SEO clients with a free, review of their website in the first month of work. For most businesses, basic is best.

These are hard times for sure, but there is still plenty of new business to be had. The best way to get those enquiries is to push your marketing in the most cost-effective way possible and forge the relationships that will see your business blossom when times are better.

Whilst we do (and seemingly always will) see Google as our first choice search engine, in the past couple of months we have come to enjoy Wolfram Alpha’s computational search. The two are different yet comparable – whilst Google focuses on results most relevant to your keywords, Wolfram computes an answer to your query based on its own database of knowledge.

So, sometimes you’ll find yourself wanting to use both. For example, if you wanted to know something as specific as the current population of China, Google will give you plenty of sites and pages with information pertaining to the answers, but Wolfram Alpha gives you the data straight away, and as many statistics as it deems relevant (such as population density, average age, life expectancy etc.). Of course, Wolfram is less useful if you’re after something less specific, or something that couldn’t be in its knowledge base, for example if you typed “SEO company Brighton”, Wolfram Alpha can’t help. Yet.

In a way, the difference between the two is as marked as the difference between intelligence and knowledge. Google (the intelligent search) adopts complex algorithmic searches that take myriad factors into consideration before presenting you with what it perceives to be the most relevant results. Wolfram Alpha (the knowledgeable search) parses your keywords and relates them to its own accumulation of facts and figures, and presents the relevant data in both textual and graphical formats.

Between the two, you can usually find what you’re after (and plenty of irrelevant yet interesting material besides); and happily, some clever chap has combined the two into a two-column search mashup, unimaginatively titled Goofram. One query, two pages of results. Convenient.

This September, we will be exhibiting at StudyWorld London, the language industry’s premier event for schools and agents.

Come and visit us at stand 20, upstairs the the Hilton London Metropole on September 7th-9th to chat SEO, social media and online strategy. We work with a number of Europe and the world’s leading language training companies and have achieved some striking results over the past six years for brands including Linguaphone, International House, Enforex, ESL, Cactus and many more.

If you would like to book in some face to face time with one of our team, drop us a line in advance and we can schedule a meeting in either at or around the event. If you are a language school with a website that you suspect could be performing better, please send us a link to your site so we can have a look through before the event and offer some expert feedback.

For more about the event, check out the website here.

See you at the fair!