Many articles have been written recently on the negative affect that this recession is having on business. Most of them repeat the same message of hardship, cut-backs and lost business. It’s hard not to become discouraged. But a few articles have come across my Inbox that have shed small glimmers of hope, in the form of insights into how we can be using the slowdown to re-group and make effective changes in preparation for better days.

The first was an article from Google, which outlined the importance of optimizing campaigns wisely. There were six steps mentioned for maximizing SEM efforts.

• Focus on the savings: special offers, discounts, and rebates are important to all right now, and are essential a well rounded creative set if applicable.

• Extend the value even into your keyword set: “discounted”, “cheap”, “coupons” etc. may be very effective areas of keyword expansion.
• Get targeted: Take the time to comb through your campaigns and re-organize if need be to ensure the most targeted and relevant ad groups (and by extension creative) possible.

• Cut the waste: What is working and what is not? Don’t get too attached to a keyword or ad message. Get rid of terms and messaging that are driving low metrics.

• Make it easy: Ensure that you’re placing the users in the best position on your site to complete your desired action. This will usually work best when evaluated and deployed on a keyword level.

• Focus: Evaluate the campaign’s goals and performance. Discover where the most traffic, action or revenue potential is and focus efforts and dollars there.

All of these tactics are highly effective in tailoring SEM campaigns and are even more important as belts are being tightened on both the business and consumer sides.

The second article I found to be both hopeful and helpful focuses less on advertising tactics and more on creative thinking in general. The author speaks of two ways that he has seen his clients take off after times of slow business. His point is that thinking outside of the box, even in the smallest of details, can have a large impact on business.

• Test your strengths: In these times of shifting consumer behavior and slower spending, what products are still doing well and how can that be leveraged to bring additional business in? This could mean changes to your overall marketing strategy down to slight tweaks of the navigation or focal points on the website to focus more on the stronger business areas.
• Get in touch with your workforce: Create environments of creativity and innovation in which the employees out there on the front lines can voice their ideas for competitive differentiation or new angles on messaging. Use the ideas and/or feedback to freshen up or create new processes, creative, etc. Google is given as a prime example of this. They encourage time spent each week on individual projects and praise innovation. We all know how successful Google has become over their competitors!

The online space not only changes quickly, it gives it’s advertisers the ability change quickly as well. Meaning that we can adapt successfully to changing business needs and economic climates with careful planning, analysis and a bit creative thinking.