Be canny, keen and lean for a successful New Year

Posted by David Hodson-Whittle on 1 June 2009 | 0 Comments

There aren’t many businesses looking forward to the New Year with their usual optimism.  Traditionally it’s a time to review, refresh and renew.  Put those new ideas into play and approach everything with a New Year spring in your step.

But this year there’s a big black cloud called the ‘credit crunch’, which means everyone’s feeling the pressure of economic slow down as cash and credit become more and more limited.  Instead of optimism, the New Year is being looked forward to with apprehension and caution.

We’ve noticed that some businesses are already responding to the current situation by cutting back on their marketing activities such as advertising, PR and exhibitions, viewing them as ‘peripheral’ to their core business.  This is an understandable but, in my view, grave mistake.

Tougher times bring tougher competition, and if you’re not out there promoting yourself and your services you may find business dropping off organically or being poached by others who are still marketing themselves.  A basic rule of business is that you can only sell something if people know about you. 

Businesses of all sizes are having to cut back on spending, but the ones still selling themselves are likely to have maintained or even seen an increase in their return as they fill the gaps left by those no longer doing marketing. 

The trick is to be targeted and strategic.  This will enable a business to make its marketing budget go further and reap more return for the core business.    Smart marketing is all about knowing your customers, knowing what they want and, particularly in the current climate, knowing what represents good value to them. 

Then you have to find the most effective route to reach those customers – what achieves the highest conversion.  So rather than throwing your marketing net wide and doing advertising, PR, some e-marketing, a couple of exhibitions and the odd bit of direct mail, figure out which single or combination of marketing approaches works best and focus on that.  This should help bring you the best returns for your marketing pound in today’s market.

Whilst you’re doing this it’s worth looking inwards at the rest of your operation to see how efficiencies can be made.

In our experience, having just been awarded Investors in People status for a second time, one of the most valuable marketing assets a business has is its staff. 

Motivating and developing your staff can help you expand your business portfolio, as they’ll be able to meet client’s needs with increasing flexibility and efficiency.  This in itself should be seen as part and parcel of how you market yourself.  Your staff are your ambassadors.  If they are focused, effective and motivated they will consistently exceed customer expectations and help win loyalty and those all important onward recommendations.

Another key survival strategy is to market your way into new sectors.  You might be amazed at the mobility of your product or services, and decreasing your reliance on a single sector will help make your business recession proof.  A previous employer once said to me, ‘I want you to increase business with this customer but make it a smaller percentage of our overall sales.’  This has always stayed with me and remains the basis of how I run SW1’s sales and business planning which, I’m pleased to say, are growing despite the credit crunch.