Let's make one thing clear: I have not spent one dollar with Perry's company. Not for lack of want, but our department didn't want to put the time and money into more than basic PPC training. I think they reimbursed me for a book I bought on the subject and that was about it.

So free resources and information were crucial. I needed to acquire as best I could what these experts knew and condense that knowledge very quickly into results. Without Perry's daily email I would have been months behind.

His email today is a Facebook assessment test. Answer questions, get a score. I ran a bunch of different answers through and it was pretty honest and accurate in the number scoring. And that's just one day and one email. If you consume a lot of the free information he dishes up, you will certainly glean a lot of wisdom about Google, Adwords, PPC and lots of other online marketing topics.

However, we at Montauk Marketing & Design love to explain and define marketing concepts using atypical models as a means to give things context and perspective that our clients can more readily grasp. Now you're asking yourself; How can a model based in systems theory tell me something about my marketing partner? (Disclaimer: I was asking myself the same thing when a former colleague of mine, well-versed in systems theory, initiated the conversation that spawned this post.)

Without daring to bore you with the details of DIKW applied to systems theory, let's get right to applying each step in the hierarchy to the marketing world, and how that can shape the way that you size up marketing service providers.

Data - The lowest card in the deck. A phone number without an owner....pretty unsubstantial stuff on its own

We move higher up...
Information - Being able to cobble together disparate types of data into a relation ship. Knowing who Jane Smith is AND her phone number is INFORMATION.

We move higher up...
Knowledge - The fact that piecing together pieces of data to form information NETS you something: If I call Jane Smith on her telephone number, I can get tickets to a sold out concert.

Last step...
Wisdom - Gleaning some kind of value from your KNOWLEDGE: If I call Jane Smith on her phone number, I will get tickets that are fake. I will be ripped off and not be allowed into the show. Hence, Jane Smith is a fraudulent ticket broker...

An extreme example to be sure. But really, the apex of marketing success is being able to derive WISDOM from your marketing information. Don't just know your demographic, know their nuances. Don't just shovel one-way communication at your audience, develop DIALOGUE with them. If you pay close attention to your customers, you glean wisdom.

But be careful, you might find out who your core buyers are and more and better ways to serve them. And you may uncover weaknesses in your product or service that need immediate attention. And you may revise your business strategy or product planning. Wisdom should be the goal. Your marketing staff or partners should be able to lead you there.

Got template?

These newfangled sites come with a low price tag (hopefully), and heavily leverage templates as the basis for the design and layout, incorporating a lot of third party plug-ins. Again, this is fine except for the fact that many service providers bill such sites as "custom" when they are anything but; though they may be customizable to an extent, too many sites look the same. The high level of flexibility of the best of them is impressive, yet it still falls short of the pixel-perfect, correctly coded and optimized custom design.

We are also seeing more and more business and organization websites being published as blogs. The layman may not spot the difference, but it is easy to see if you know what to look for. Content is posted in chronological order, from newest to oldest, rather than the customary form of easily navigable pages. To all companies with corporate sites running as blogs: Good luck getting your arms around your SEO. And don't forget to continuously read all those posts for any information that should be end-of-lifed. Oh, and one more thing; seriously consider consolidating your content into clear, concise and navigable pages. Most people don't want to wade through pages of posts to discover more about you and your business offerings.

When considering between going with a template based design or one that is custom, the customer should also ask their web design firm about their experience in all aspects of designing an SEO friendly website.

Case in point: We recently engaged with a client who had seemingly done everything the "right way" in building his web presence, dating back 14 years! I highly respect the CEO's approach of being ahead of the curve, but that particular website was a tangled mess of templates and sloppy code. Not only that, but the designer's SEO efforts had a ruinous effect on their search ranking. The problems are too many to list here but there were far too many keywords, content that was delivered in a way that it would not be seen by the search engines, and the website copy was way out of sync with the business.

The truth is, Montauk Marketing & Design offers both approaches to our clients. We place importance on communicating the different ramifications each approach has. But in the end, blogs are blogs. They are great in support of a business mission but not necessarily as main information delivery mechanism. And the template approach is best for low-budget, introductory websites, as long as your web developer can customize the work to suit your needs, and can demonstrate a history of strong SEO results for their template-based work.

The usual answers are either budgets get slashed, or marketing downsizes and spends budget much more frugally. If your company falls into the first category, we pose the question, Why? Reducing spend is for the weak and uninformed!

This marketer just got the memo from the CFO: Budget cuts effectively immediately

Never mind the obvious pitfalls of companies using "set it and forget it" marketing techniques, continuous measuring and improvement should be the goal. So when lofty goals and high expenditures come crashing down to reality, many small and mid sized businesses are caught without a contingency plan, or the deep and involved understanding of their own marketing mix. When ties get severed with big name, high priced marketing service providers, too often crucial marketing intelligence disappears along with the working relationship.

See? Smaller is often better, in terms of Recessionist Marketing and the marketing service providers you work with.

Case in point: In a recent conversation with Morgan Rae Berk, a contact of mine who owns her own event-planning company, she was starting to sell a lot of new clients on the fact that she had all the tools at her disposal of a large and overpriced event-planning firm, without the huge overhead. The clients were keen to keep their forecasts on target and their events rolling; only in a smarter, cheaper way. Her event-planning business is thriving thanks to her ability to provide just about everything a larger provider could, and deliver a higher level of flexibility and customer focus. Plus, like any good professional, she keeps a stellar network of people relevant to her business and its success.

As Morgan says:

Shrinking budgets are actually a godsend for the non-agency. A smaller budget means firms are looking for creative ways to get their projects completed without sacrificing quality. (Plus our) collective network can do the same workload as an agency, without adding large overhead expense lines to their budgets. Plus, this allows for a much more diverse talent pool; I can choose who is best for the specific project at hand and am not stuck with the same creative team every time.

In one of Morgan's current engagements, the client is the tourist bureau of a well-traveled tropical island. The tourist bureau needs to maximize budget, and has chosen to work with her for a fraction of the cost of a big-name, high-overhead firm, without losing any impact or reducing expectations. Through her firm, the bureau is getting more than they could have asked for through a highly personalized touch, and her ability to execute and manage all facets of their event. Let's not forget the network; she has more travel and tourism media at her disposal than one can conceive. The PR gains alone increase her value exponentially.*

Who does your small marketing partner know? Prepackaged and well-hyped claims are not our business; Getting things done right for less is...

How else do we save your marketing and save you $$$? We'll explore more ideas on this topic in future posts.

*Do ask who your small marketing partner knows. If they are worth their salt, they have contacts at their disposal that can be invaluable in high impact, low dollar marketing.

Do we feel safe and comfortable with the notion that Google is THE search engine? Ok, let's move on to our point. Somewhere in the conversation the subject of Google AdWords arises. Often the customer just wants to be educated about it, to explore it as an advertising channel. Other times, our firm is suggesting that they implement some AdWords campaigns (actually, working with Montauk Marketing & Design is a best practice!) to test and refine, usually in order to generate targeted leads

The problems inherent to Adwords are:

1. It is a system unto itself, and a powerful one at that. It takes considerable time to really learn it and produce the results you want.

2. It is expensive. There have been many a woeful tale of a small company that thinks setting up some Google ads is a great idea. They get their account, set it to auto-renew on a credit card, and a few months later they are wondering where several grand went. It does happen.

How about the spiraling costs of bidding on competitive keywords. There are some useful strategies for getting Adwords clicks while avoiding the high-price bidding wars for most companies, but whether Adwords is the best choice or not is something that should be seriously thought out. It's not the platform to jump on just because everyone else has.

Ask yourself a question. When was the last time you clicked on an Adwords ad? You may have and not known it, by clicking on the top two results on a search page, which are often used for ad space. But when was the last time you were drawn to those ads on the right side of the page? In the informal polling we have done, there are not many among us clicking with regularity on those ads.

So we see lots of $ = underachieving results.

The alternatives are plenty. But we won't reveal them all at once. In Adwords, you essentially pay a lot to target a tiny slice of the Google universe, and hope they see you. One other way to develop your strategy is by considering options on sites that focus on your subject matter. This is advantageous because you don't have to hope your offer is getting in front of the right eyeballs, you already have a targeted audience.

For instance, a few years ago we worked with a company that was putting $100 per day into Adwords. We reduced the spend on that, and found some very interesting alternative options for advertising. The Adwords account was receiving about 65 clicks a day. The alternative option was buying banner space on a blog written by someone who just happened to love the types of products this company produced. They had about 10,000 unique visitors per month, a sneeze of the potential traffic Google can garner, yet the price for a banner was just right: $250/month.

Before long, that ad was getting 45 clicks a day, with 12-15 new leads coming in. Therefore, Adwords isn't always the answer.  By going with another option, the Cost Per Click fell drastically, and the lead quality improved. And that was just one alternative ad source!

As jobs, credit lines and companies disappear, uncertainty is replacing brashness as a dominant characteristic. Businesses of all sizes share the challenges that stand in the way of profits, growth and objectives due to the financial tremors we are enduring.

Thus we introduce RecessionistMarketing.com, to highlight stories, ideas and insights on marketing the right way today.