Marketing, can you afford not to?

Tough times call for tough measures and that usually means cutting costs.  One of the first areas that a business tends to cut back on is marketing. 

The trouble is that when the economy slows many companies fall in to the trap of pulling all marketing spend because it is not seen as essential to the survival of the business.  Not true.  You need to be more proactive in your marketing activity in a difficult climate because it will help your company survive. 

There is a common view that marketing is incredibly costly and does not easily demonstrate return on investment. That opinion often influences decisions to pull activity.  There is no denying that marketing activity can at times be expensive. However, it is usually when a company does not apply some basic marketing principles that it blows the budget and suffers from lack of return.

It is an issue that I come across frequently when talking to my clients and prospects.  All too often they tell me that me that they are reluctant to spend on marketing because it has not worked for them before.  This usually comes down to the fact that they simply have not stuck to budgets, monitored campaigns or defined their target audiences properly.  The other mistake that occurs is being over ambitious with regard to the setting of timescales and objectives.  You must keep it realistic.

Marketing does not have to be a costly exercise.  It can work on the smallest scale if you use it properly.  I regularly work with small businesses that have the most limited of marketing budgets available.   We still manage to churn out successful campaigns that deliver results and help them grow in line with their business objectives. 

The key to marketing is knowing how to apply it correctly and this is where businesses who do not have a marketing resource can struggle.  They simply do not plan and measure activity properly and fail to target effectively.  The result can be a lot of money wasted on campaigns that do not work and because they have no tools in place to monitor success rates they cannot measure return.  The other extreme is that companies fear marketing so much that they simply don’t bother doing any.

You need to make your marketing strategy as effective and efficient as possible.  Apply the principles of theoretical marketing with your businesses objectives, resource and budget and you will be well on your way.

So to help you get started here are my five key tips to help you remain proactive and improve the efficiency of your marketing activity:

1. Prepare a marketing plan that takes your business through twelve month’s activity and covers both new lead generation and customer retention. 
2. Ensure that your brand is consistent.  From your promotional material such as websites, mailers and brochures all the way through to your business stationery, everything that you issue must have a consistent look and feel.  The result is carefully planned design and that will reduce your outlay on design costs.
3.  Segment your market.   The most effective campaigns are those where the target audience has been successfully segmented.  The more accurately you define your audience, the easier it will be for you to prepare campaigns with messaging that is most appropriate to them.
4. Invest in good quality data.  A campaign is only as good as the data you use, so ensure that your data is up to date and that each record contains a named decision maker. 

Measure, measure, measure.  Introduce a simple technique to measure every single campaign that you issue.  You need to know which campaigns generate the most leads for you, so that you can repeat them in the future.