It is easy to get drawn into fear and panic in these times of economic turmoil. Marketers at many companies feel pressure to cut their advertising and marketing budgets due to the uncertainty of the economic environment.  Don't.

These markets represent a great opportunity. Instead of cutting, focus your budget with laser precision and increase your share-of-voice. Like a long-term investor, the savvy marketer sees opportunity in chaos, and realizes that their marketing dollar today goes further when there is less competition vying for media placements. Savvy investors buy when everyone else is selling. The savvy marketer realizes that many of his/her competitors are cutting marketing budgets in this economic cycle--and that these marketing dollars today buy more than they did yesterday. In essence, like stocks, marketing opportunities are "on sale." Weak markets present excellent opportunities for buyers to negotiate better deals through price, contract terms, and extracting added value. Aggressive marketing when your competitors are cutting their budgets yields a higher relative share of voice and a great opportunity for brand-building in a less cluttered environment.

Stay Focused: Make sure you don't forget the B2B buying cycle.  Most B2B purchasing decisions are complex and usually happen over a 30-90 period.  In weak economic times this may be streched to 90-120 days.   In today’s economic climate, finding potential buyers, actually in market for your product or service is even harder.  Your goal is to get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time.   Search, behavioral targeting and "intent retargeting" are excellent solutions that enable you to use your marketing dollars efficiently.

There are some great opportunities for marketers such as you to leverage in these hard times:

Check out these companies:

1. InflectionPointMedia.com (I'm the CEO and built this business for this exact reason).

2. Bizo.com.  Spun off by ZoomInfo.com ....these guys will help you target at the the "user profile" level.  Very interesting.

3. Business.com:  I worked here for 5 years...a great vertical search engine...with a great user experience

4. Revenue Science:  A Traditional Behavioral Targeting (BT) with a great team and great technology....

5. Check out local search....Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, DexKnows.com, Local.com etc.