These are turbulent times for all businesses - necessitating
streamlined marketing processes that are finely honed to mesh with
today's sputtering global economy.
1) Don't stop advertising because the economy is sluggish -
increase it, as many of your competitors are foolishly slowing down
and you can grab market share! Look at what Dell has done to Gateway
in the last eighteen months – Gateway has lost 10-20% of their market
share and are pulling in their horns, while Dell's slice of the pie
has grown bigger.
2) Negotiate aggressively with media sources – its tough right
now for online and offline publishers to generate advertising revenue
and they are being forced to consider any and all deals. Note the
number of "house ads" being run by major portals like Yahoo and
Internet.com, 20-30% of their banner ads or sponsorship buttons are
promoting their own businesses.
3) It's no secret that many ecommerce sites look like Amazon.com
– it pays to mirror existing market leaders' web site design. People
always resist change and familiarity is one of key reasons why they
shop on and offline in the same stores.
4) Niche marketing has almost become a homily – but it enables
your company to leverage your marketing expenditures and R&D costs by
concentrating on a narrow market segment. ToolLogic, Inc.
(www.toollogic.com) is a wonderful example of a company that
created/found a niche and then dominated it.
5) What's unique about your company, services and/or products?
When you understand this you've just created "brand
uniqueness" – make sure you integrate these themes with all of your
marketing; customers need to know what's different about your company
versus your competitors. Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream
(www.benandjerrys.com) did
a wonderful job of developing brand uniqueness in a commodity market
(ice cream) that enabled them to build a great company.
6) A key attribute for any successful marketing campaign is
repetition – your company may not have the marketing resources of
an Intel (their "Intel Inside" campaign far exceeded their
marketing goals) but you do need to repeat your message and reinforce
the branding and market awareness by touching your market segment via
multiple reinforcing marketing processes; i.e. search engine ranking,
print, opt-in e-mail, radio/TV, sponsorship buttons, newsletter
inserts, etc.
7) Make it easy to do business with your company by offering pricing
and terms of service that fit your client's needs – Digit-Net
technologies (www.digi-net.com) sells software and or ASP services to
its customers by offering them terms of services that can be flexed
to fit their needs, not the other way around.
8) Switching costs are high in this challenging market –
companies and individuals don't want to change their habits, as this
can cost them more money. So, figure out how you can adapt your
products and services to fit their needs to minimize their switching
costs. Then, communicate this effectively via all of your marketing
processes.
About the Author
Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing and business development
experience He is the co-founder of a Northern California and Brussels
Belgium based Interactive Advertising Agency, Intelective
Communications, Inc. www.intelective.com Intelective focuses
exclusively on providing strategic and tactical marketing services to
small to medium sized companies. He can be reached at
Lee@intelective.com