New Digital Medium

It’s counter-intuitive, but market share is gained during a recession. When the economy starts to contract, the dismal shadow of negative news causes many companies to pull back their spending in a knee-jerk reaction. The companies with a level head are the ones who continue to make gains.

Granted, it’s hard to keep spending while everything else is going down. Here are some ways to make the process easier:

1. Use zero-base budgeting to build a 12-month marketing plan - Zero-based budgeting is a technique used by big business to re-create plans from scratch. The process starts with a blank sheet and everyone discusses and debates adding each new marketing vehicle. Nothing is safe, everything gets removed. The process eliminates any blind-spots and dismisses favoritism. It’s tedious, but worth it.

2. Start measuring - Start tracking every dollar spent compared to revenue. For every dollar that goes out, you should be getting more than one dollar in return. Otherwise, ditch the marketing. Monitoring is easy with digital and it’s a little more complicated with offline techniques. If you can’t measure it, ditch it.

3. Contact your marketing vendors - Many times, vendors add services and products during the year that go unnoticed by customers. There may be complimentary services being offered that you, the customer, use. This benefits you because (1) you may reduce your total number of vendors and (2) you may be able to grab a discounted price for multiple services.

Taking marketing share during a recession takes a level head. Don’t get nervous and keep a keen eye on the end goal - gaining market share. When we swing out of this downturn, you’ll be praised as a hero.

Why you should be using social media in your marketing campaign:

1) The people are there - The numbers are there. There are 150 million on Facebook alone. That number doesn’t include MySpace and the other social networks. In some countries, social networks have a citizen penetration close to 90%.

2) It’s easier to create a personal relationship, which makes conversion easier - The old process of interrupting consumers is dead. Today’s consumers want a stronger and more meaningful connection to businesses. Social media facilitates this new behavior and creates a stronger ability to convert new customers.

3) You can create a digital net to allow new customers to find you - By integrating multiple digital channels with social media, a company can create multiple avenues of awareness for new customers to find them.

4) News about a company is easier to spread - As long as you continue to do good, people will talk about you and recommend you to others. This sharing/spreading news is built-in to the fabric of social media.

5) It’s cheaper than traditional media - In dollars, of course. Not in time. Trust takes time.

There is no one single set of answers for all businesses marketing on a limited budget. Someone with a budget of $5million dollars will be in a different category than someone with a budget of $50,000.

So here are some general thoughts -

1) Remind everyone in the organization that they are responsible for marketing - Customer support staff, the receptionist, and the janitor all have an impact on your companies success. Don’t let anyone in your company give a customer a reason to not be around.

2) Comb through all unused lists/resources for new customers - Almost every customer/client I’ve known has multiple lists or old databases that they haven’t completely exhausted. Now is the time.

3) Look for cross-selling opportunities - Review your existing customer base for opportunities for supplementary and complimentary products. You should always add value in these situations and don’t go after them just to ‘make a sale.’ But, there are often customers who would be happy to buy new products from you if there’s benefit.

5) Start measuring - You need to know what’s working in your marketing campaign. Measuring and testing are the only ways to find out this information. If your budget gets smaller, you’ll want to cut those low performing items. If you budget stays the same, you’ll want to re-focus your efforts on the marketing vehicles with the highest ROI.

Over the summer, Google announced that they were indexing over 1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) web pages*. That’s a large number, even for computers. This means that for business, the idea that your website will automatically receive visitors is dead. This was true several years ago, but no longer.

There are many tools today for businesses to use on the web. At a minimum, you should be investing in daily updates to your site, as well as analytics and traffic generation.

* One trillion seconds is equal to 31,546 years.