In Our Opinion

Marketing through the recession – its a no brainer!

Wilson Henry’s resident marketing guru Peter Alcock provides some sage words on the issue of marketing activity in a recession:

"The notion that somehow you turn 'on' or 'off' your marketing switch really fails to understand what marketing is all about", he argues. "In truth everything you do (or don’t do) sends some kind of message to your customers and would be customers. What is really amazing to me is that somehow marketing is viewed as just a 'cost' like rent or rates."

Marketing is essentially an investment activity that is made up of soft investment (eg time spent on marketing activity with perhaps little or no marginal cost) and hard investment (eg advertising spend) and what is key, particularly when times are hard, is that you closely and constantly measure and monitor the return on that investment by way of say 'number of leads generated', customer satisfaction scores, or new business won

He offers 10 Top Tips for marketing in a recession

Position yourself ! Marketing is all about communicating your service message clearly to your targeted segment of the market in a way that differentiates you from the competition. It matters particularly when times are tough and business is shopping round for the best deal.
Branding – does everyone in your organisation understand your brand values including YOU? What is your brand 'promise'? Does everyone deliver on the basis of this, be it say guaranteed delivery times every time? Do you have a reputation for consistency? If not, this is very often a breakdown in human process. Work with your team to identify the cause and fix this. Bluntly, get people to shape up or ship out if their values don’t resonate with the organisation.
Cut out marketing waste – any investment that is not doing anything for you should be pruned. If your Yellow Pages advert is due for renewal ask yourself if it generated anything for you last year, if so, was it enough to justify the spend? PS – if you are not measuring ad responses then you should be.
Ask for referrals – the cheapest and most effective marketing can be simply asking a highly satisfied customer to refer business to you. It costs nothing to ask!
Measure things – if you don’t measure you don’t manage. It’s extremely important that you sweat your marketing assets and ensure they work for you. For instance, make sure you have a system that tracks the referral source for every new piece of business won, be it: existing customer, cross selling, work provider, friend, advert, coupon, network or some other means.
Up sell and cross sell – there is nothing wrong in ethically trying to get customers to buy a better model or service within the range, or even move them to a different product/service range if they send out the buying signals.
Customer care . You would assume that in a recession, business would be falling over themselves to offer great service, wouldn’t you? Wrong, it’s amazing the lack of customer care that we are seeing day in day out. Once you have customers who have perceived indifference to doing business with you then you are on the rocky road and the next time they may not come back. Don’t be a loser!
Understand customer lifetime value . Savvy business knows the value of a long term business relationship rather than a one off transaction (note: it's 7 times more expensive to win a new customer than investing to retain an existing one). In the right circumstances be prepared to give a bit on the basis that you will win in the long term.
The 80/20 rule . We’ll say it again – the likelihood is that 80% of your profits come from top 20% of your clients – invest heavily in those relationships as they are the ones that deliver regularly for you.
Review the competition. Key to remaining competitive is understanding what the competition is up to – it’s a statement of the obvious but so often forgotten about. If someone is undercutting on price how are you reacting to this? Should you be majoring your offering on non-price elements eg speed of delivery, quality etc. Key to this is understanding which bit of the market you occupy and what your customers expect. Don’t try to be all things to all men – it very rarely works.