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Recession - Busting

Marketing that Can Help you Tackle the Recession

Global recession is forcing organizations to adopt desperate survival techniques to cut cost and save money—including eliminating non-core businesses and outsourcing every function that can be outsourced.

For entrepreneurs and Chief Marketing Officers, such times—hard to deal with as they are—nevertheless provide an opportunity to adopt changes that otherwise might be impossible. For those who have been frustrated trying to manage the cost of internal resources and deal with the limitations of the skill levels of internal resources, this is a golden opportunity—to outsource marketing activities—retaining a minimum team internally to oversee the deliverables.

Entrepreneurs have an even better opportunity—they can outsource the entire marketing function itself, while staying focused on managing the relationship with present customers better, constantly improving existing products or services, developing and launching new products suitable for the times, and sales.

Companies that resort to cutting spend and completely eliminating parts of business during recession usually emerge with poorer products or services after recession. This is a lesson marketers learnt the hard way during the 2000-2001 recession. But the nature of the current downturn—and the changes the marketing and sales environment has undergone since 2000—suggests that those who follow the survival techniques of past slowdowns risk betting on the wrong markets, customers, advertising vehicles, or sales approaches.

Today’s extreme uncertainty demands constant attention, frequent reprioritization, and strategies that anticipate and respond to a changing landscape. The time has to come to achieve more from less and that means trying out different approaches of utilizing the marketing budget to get maximum return on investment.

So, here are a few recommendations to help you navigate your way through troubled times.

Reprioritize Geographies

The impact of recession varies across economies. Today, historically profitable markets have become graveyards of organizations, as those who were over-consuming learn the virtue of thrift. Emerging markets with significant pent-up domestic consumption demand and favorable demographic ratios, will, however, continue to grow, albeit at a slower rate. Companies have begun to shift their marketing budgets from developed to emerging markets. This has led to reassessment of existing marketing strategies—what worked in the United States is unlikely to work in India. Organizations are back to the drawing board, chalking out market entry strategy.

If you are one such company click here to see how we can help you.

Diversify spend: Go On-Line

Marketing professionals can no longer rely on advertising or events to create a pipeline for sales. Budgets are low. People have stopped reading printed publications and significantly reduced watching television. Instead, they are on-line, more often than not. How does one then reach out to them? Fragmentation of the market has led to proliferation of a complex mix of marketing vehicles and sales models. This makes it imperative for marketing budgets to include new vehicles like social media, and to use tools like emails, web logs (blogs), webcasts and podcasts etc. Forrester Research, in 2008, stated that anywhere between 40 to 50% of executives will increase their online marketing spend IF the economy is in recession. Now, that the global economy IS in recession, are you ready with a suitable marketing plan?

In an increasingly cluttered marketplace, broad reach options will continue to lose effectiveness. Highly targeted delivery will come at a higher price as demand outstrips the supply of good inventory and good people to execute. Consumers, too, will become increasingly savvy with respect to their digital media usage patterns, and harder to “impress” with incrementally new ideas or executions.

The answer to the dilemma is to get your expectations right from the digital media and have a balanced marketing budget for different activities based on the returns that you expect from each activity.

Let us help you come up with an ideal mix of marketing activities for your company based within the budget allocated. Click here to contact us.

Optimize your sales process

In the 2008 Sales Performance Optimization survey, 50% of leads were reported to have been self-generated by sales representatives. In addition, 20% of opportunities forecast to be won resulted instead in no decision—that is, no purchase ultimately being made. Pursuing these non-deals throughout the entire sales cycle (to forecast close) is a costly waste of resources.

If your company’s reaction to recession is to completely cut back the office sales process and concentrate all efforts on field sales, sales representatives will stretch themselves too thin trying to generate leads and incubate leads, while also trying to close the deal. To avoid this, your organization needs a mature lead generation process, which, in turn, will optimize the sales process. Shifting the lead generation process from being a quantitative game to a quality game will eliminate the wasted efforts.

Click here to see how we can help you in this aspect.

Integrate and Optimize Marketing & Communication

The primary focus of any marketing activity that is undertaken by the organization should be to increase revenue by generating more sales. This becomes even more imperative in times like these, when the existing marketing communication and initiatives should all be tied to one and only one goal of generating more business. The times are tough, but are you optimally using effective marketing tools you already have… like your website, public relations, etc.? Get an expert to analyze your target segment and marketing plan, and help you to tie in all the communication channels.