Why You Should Market MORE – Not Less – When Times Are Tough
Whenever times get tough for businesses, CEOs talk about “tightening their belts” as a way to signify cutting back on essentials in order to ride out the rough patch. And cutting back is a correct strategy. It’s definitely not the time to dole out generous bonuses, arrange extravagant company trips or find new company perks to buy into! Instead, it’s the time to review every expense and ensure that only those affecting your bottom line are kept in tact. It’s also the time to evaluate personnel or positions that may no longer be as necessary in slower sales times.
But all too often, the first place that gets cut instead is the company’s marketing budget. And that’s a HUGE mistake because marketing is the very activity that drives in more potential customers.
Marketing is the very food that fuels your sales efforts. So when marketing budgets are cut, you can almost immediately see the dwindling spiral of leads and sales. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the connection.
If anything, marketing should be strengthened during down times – and it’s incumbent upon the CEO to find any way possible to figure out how this can be done. Here are a few tips that can help with your marketing efforts in rough times:
- Increase “outflow.” Whether you market through direct mail, email blasts, advertising or publicity – now, more than ever, is the time to push information out about the value and benefits of your products to potential customers. It’s also the time to get as creative as possible with “out-of-the-box” ideas on how you can more cost-effectively spread the word!
The universal truth about sales is that you won’t get new customers if your information and promotional material doesn’t exist in a wide variety of places outside the doors of your business.
- Review your marketing tactics. Now is the time to analyze which marketing tactics are working the best – and just as important – which marketing tactics are your least successful. If, for example, you experienced a sudden uptick in inbound calls a week after a new direct mail piece was mailed, then by all means expand the reach of that mailer. The reverse is true as well. If your promotion is producing zilch, drop it and instead find and resurrect one that worked well for you in the past!
If you got a big bump after the local paper wrote a story about you, reach out to your local radio and TV talk shows about having you as a guest so you can build on the buzz!
- Examine your pricing. Customers in both the consumer and B2B marketplace typically make buying decisions based on a combination of price, quality and value. There may not be much you can do to improve the quality of your product or service, but you can certainly increase value by offering specials on your pricing. Let’s face it – if your company is looking to cut costs, other companies are doing the same, so give them a reason to choose you. Look hard at your pricing and determine how much margin you have to play with in offering introductory specials. Then, promote like crazy to let everyone in your database know of your special offer!
There are a variety of ways you can win in a down market, but the primary principle to remember is to increase your outflow! You may not know whether your current marketing is working as well as you hoped, but it is far better to discover it is succeeding by expanding it and creating more business, than it is to cut it and watch the bottom drop out of your sales.
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Masha, I completely agree and I’ve started more local networking with small business owners in various groups where you can actually shake the hand of the person you will be doing business with.
While the majority of my clients are out of state, have never met and most likely will never meet me, those nearest to me are in a place where I can say, here I am, live and in the flesh.
For the new year, I’m discontinuing networking groups that haven’t been successful and actively seeking new networking connections. I’ve also stepped up my online connections to get to know more people who need my services even if they don’t know it yet.
Thanks for the link, your post and sharing you knowledge with others. Take care and God bless.
When times are tighter, marketing and advertising need to used to apply even more effort and consistency.
Whiners may sit down and whine, but that does no good. Whiners appear to be lofty and intellectual but they’re justifying fear and incecision and despair.
The choice is clear–try harder and try it more often.
John J. Alquist
Very very good information here on your blog.
I have really enjoyed reading this blog post today.
Great information, knowledge and expertise has been shared.
For which I thank you.
Mark McCulloch
It’s amazing how often you see companies making this fundamental mistake. Seriously, this was covered in my Marketing 101 class in college, but so many companies forget the most basic principals of marketing and cut back on marketing activities just when they should be expanding them.
In my experience, the best run, most successful companies are customer-focued and, hence, sales & marketing driven. Whenever you see a company that makes most of its decisions based on financial, production, or legal concerns ahead of sales/marketing/customer service concerns (i.e. the things that acquire new customers/revenues and retain existing ones), you know that company is in trouble. JMHO.
Thanks everyone for your comments!
I landed here from a tweet you posted today. You’re hitting the nail on the head. To complement your post, if you don’t mind, let me point your readers to two blog posts I wrote about the same subject:
How to Survive in a Downturn Economy, part 1 – http://ow.ly/1gNEM
How to Survive in a Downturn Economy, part 2 – http://ow.ly/1gNJP
On the other hand, all the things a company needs to do to ride the storm are things they should be doing all the time, downturn or not. It amazes me that many are willing to listen to good advice only when things are turning for the worse. There’s never too much good business in the pipeline!
Kimmo – Thanks for your comment and the links to your great blog posts!