Any marketing expert will tell you that if you advertise more in a down market you can capture market share. Unfortunately, down markets are expert at draining marketing budgets. Still, without spending some of your resources on marketing your business, you run the risk of losing market share to competitors. Here are five ways you can do more marketing with less in 2008.
1) Create a place for your good news.
There are fewer places to publish your good news in a down market. First, a down market means fewer advertisers, which means fewer pages in the trade publications. The result is that the trades print smaller editions and there is less room for editorial material like yours.
To make matters worse, a down market provides plenty of bad news to print, which almost always takes precedence over good news. Companies going out of business, executives out of work, these are the stories people in the industry pay to read. The pitch for your feel good story is less likely to be well received in this market as no reporter wants to look like he’s ignoring the real news.
To get past these problems, the company must develop a new strategy for creating and disseminating its stories. This involves both telling the kinds of stories that the company’s prospects expect and need to hear as well as taking more responsibility for getting these stories in front of the company’s target publics. To accomplish this, companies are producing more content and making better use of their websites and prospect databases to get that information disseminated. Web 2.0 newsrooms, retained freelance writers, Businesswire distribution and multimedia are some of the ways companies are getting their good stories told in down markets.
2) Make sure your market can hear you.
When ever a market experiences a slowdown, those firms that have a marketing budget will begin to leverage it in an attempt to capture what ever business is left, creating a lot of noise in the market. The best way to be heard above the crowd is for the company to let someone talk that their target market wants to hear. One good way to do this is to develop an internal expert.
Creating an expert involves choosing an executive that both understands the business very well and that can present themselves effectively in as many media as possible. Companies can create experts by creating content that showcases the expert. This includes bylined articles, multimedia, and white papers. Speaking engagements are also helpful in establishing the executive. Company-produced audio and video are excellent ways to create experts as they can be edited to perfection before dissemination.
3) Think like a trade publication editor.
When times are tough, a company’s prospects think about what they think about when times are good: themselves. Firms that spend their entire marketing and public relations budgets talking about their own company and ignoring the real needs of their prospects are wasting their money. Sure, it’s important to fully explain your offerings, the features and benefits, but the bulk of your budget should be spent producing content that will help your prospects be more successful.
One way to do this is to effectively leverage your experts. Allowing company experts to counsel prospects before they become customers is one of the surest ways to build a relationship that will lead to a future sale. Leveraging multimedia, such as audio podcasts, video podcasts and webinars, allows your experts to help many prospects at once.
4) Rethink your trade show strategy.
Trade shows are expensive, but most companies that want to be players in an industry know they have to attend. In good times, companies may spring for huge booth spaces, lavish parties in the company suite and excursions into the city’s night life. Those things are harder to afford when the business is down, but that doesn’t mean firms shouldn’t still try to capitalize on their trade show appearance.
When the market is down and people can’t get budgets approved to visit trade shows, they are more desperate for information from these events. This is an opportunity for companies that go into the show prepared to capture or create content and share it with their prospect databases.
To capitalize on their trade show expenditures, company’s need to formulate a strategy that will allow them to capture as much content during the event as possible and then disseminate it to their target publics. This can include podcasts or webinars created at the company booth, or articles from the show that can be distributed on the company’s website, via e-mail or on compact disc.
5) Get Found on the Web.
When companies don’t have the budget to ensure that their messages get to the desks of their B2B prospects, they have to make it easy for those prospective customers to find them. The Internet is a great way to do this. One of the best ways to be found online is to produce a lot of material related directly to the needs of your target market. Pack this material with keywords that are likely to be search terms for your prospects and they will find you. This makes your website strategy very, very important. It must be far more than an online brochure in a down market.
All five of these ideas require the company to think differently about its marketing and public relations efforts and to take advantage of the new tools that are being made available through the Internet and low-cost audio and video production. The company’s that leverage these new tools will be the most successful when the industry turns around.
