Small Business Marketing in a Tough Economy
Wow, things are bleak right now. Customers aren’t shopping and banks aren’t lending. This leads to retail stores not being able to keep their doors open and shakes through manufacturers and every segment of our economy. If the big guys are laying off 15,000, what is a business of 15 employees (where everyone is essential) going to do? Shut the doors?
Maybe. It looks like this is going to be a very tough year, however the businesses that come through in the end are going to come out leaner, stronger and smarter. There are ways to protect yourself. One of the first is to look at your marketing. Cut everything that you cannot track. There is an old advertising saying – “I know 50% of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%”. Online we track everything, down to what word brought a person to your site and what they did on your site. If you haven’t yet, it is time to reassess your newspaper ads, your TV and radio and especially your yellow page advertising. I don’t have a phone book in my house and I have not for 5 years. Everything I need I find online or through my phone or from a friend.
Make sure you are featured in Google Local and other similar services. Make sure your website works, and that it is attractive and informative. If it is not look for a respected small business web design company. It doesn’t have to blow fire out computer speakers or have people walking across the screen. The most important goal of website is to deliver the information that the client is looking for and give them a reason to become your customer.
Focus on email marketing. Ask your current customers if it is okay if you send them information and then set up a system to stay in touch with them in a responsible way. Use a program like Constant Contact so you can track open rates and bounce rates. If people are unsubscribing it means you are emailing too much or not sending good information. Take some marketing money and put it into pay-per-click marketing. It will drive people to your site instantly and you can experiment with different keywords to see what converts. We don’t have to guess. I came up in newspapers, I understand how they work, but there is a reason that they are dying.
So now we have a reasonable and completely trackable plan for marketing. Our costs are cut and, for everything we do, we know how it worked. Maybe we just hold our own, maybe we lose some business, but as things start to come around, and they will, we are ready. We are lean. And we push, we don’t have to make adjustments to changing media, we have already done it. Obviously this is one facet of how a small business can make it through the tough times, but let me tell you something from experience. Businesses that cut their marketing completely when times get tough never recover. It makes more sense to focus your resources on areas that you can track completely.