We've talked about rethinking, not just reducing, your marketing spend, looking at your program as a whole to identify the best ways to invest your budget, regardless of its size...
But once your budget is properly invested, should you stop there?
No. Now it's time for message overhauls.
Many marketers do a fine job of making sure that their marketing messages are customer focused (and some don't, deferring to inside out messages that don't resonate with buyers). But is crafting messages that present the ways in which your products or solutions solve customer problems enough?
No matter how good your creative is, there's always room for improvement.
Message relevance is an excellent way to connect with buyers and outwit competitors.
There are online tools that offer invaluable insight into the phrases that customers use to search for solutions. This information can not only be used to enhance your search rankings by integrating it into your content and navigation strategy. It can be used to enhance your offline efforts and improve the effectiveness of your print materials.
Google has unveiled a pretty cool tool that allows marketers to find out what phrases marketers are really using when they're searching for products and services (hint: it's not Google Keywords and if you'd like to know more, shoot me an email). Basically, you can learn loads and loads about what your customers are thinking. And apply it to the materials that drive your customers where? Back to your web site where you can draw them ever deeper into your unique and meaningful benefits.
I'll say it again because it bears repeating: these are not days to be wasting marketing dollars. These are days to be maximizing the awareness you have, and engaging customers for that moment when the tide turns positive again.
Use every trick in the book (that's ethical) to position yourself for success.
I'm giving a presentation on global marketing tomorrow, so we'll take a hiatus from recession marketing for a few days. Can't say I mind. Is anyone else tired of bad news?
Check back tomorrow...thanks for reading
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