Smart Marketing in a Down Economy
by David Michaluk
Online Marketing Specialist
The impact of a down economy has forced the ROI mantra to the tips of tongues. Depending on your marketing focus, the resulting reduced budget and increased accountability can cause anything from minor tremors up to tectonic shifts in your marketing communications mix.
Many companies are facing a switch from brand awareness to smart customer acquisition and customer retention.
Facing these shifts in focus provides the ideal chance to take a performance-centric look at your business, customers and communications strategies.
Your Path to Market
This is an excellent time to review the channels you navigate for reaching your audience and analyze the potential gatekeepers, bottlenecks and roadblocks you face along the way.
A cataloging of gatekeeper interactions may reveal path-to-market bottlenecks you have not accounted for or marketed against. This evaluation can be especially telling in a B2D (business-to-dealer/distributor) relationship. For example, a lack of traction at a particular dealer location may not be a failure of your B2C or B2B marketing, but a breakdown at the showroom level due to inadequate sales rep training or an antiquated spiff program.
For e-commerce, major roadblocks may be closer to home. Factors like non-intuitive layout, overly complicated conversion funnels and inadequate product descriptions inadvertently encourage site visitors to leave. This makes site analysis and cohesive goals important and explains why sites are often built around tightly controlled endgames with well-scripted middlegames. You need the visitor to land on your site, quickly identify and care about the goal, and complete the goal before they lose interest. Which, thanks to site analysis software and defined conversion funnels, is entirely trackable, letting you know if your sales funnel is, in fact, more like a leaky sieve.
Your Target Audience
Tight financial times may also call for a tighter focus on your customer base. More defined geographies and more refined demographics will provide a clearer picture of your existing customer base or who your target audience should be. This is also vital information for planning product and service line extensions and store growth.
Taken further, deeper customer research, behavioral targeting (BT), sale gestation period analysis and customer lifetime value (CLV) identification, plus a a proper customer relationship management (CRM) system to coordinate this, provide you with a clearer view of which segments are worth your retention dollars and which segments negatively affect your bottom line.
Your Marketing Mix
With audiences tightly defined and your supply chain studied for any cracks, you will be well suited to tackle your marketing mix. Focusing on immediate sustainability, you can use several key marketing tactics to drive retention while concentrating acquisition efforts on audience segments that are active in the market.
For building a proactive retention marketing program, an assurance that your sales reps and websites are capturing actionable data (name, e-mail address, mobile number, mailing address, etc.) with proper implementation of your CRM system, is your first step. From there you will build customer and lead lists that you can begin to monetize.
The importance of this is twofold. First, it allows you much greater control of message frequency, since you will be able to communicate directly without relying on some form of mass media. The secondary benefit is the cost savings you will realize once you have a less expensive channel for reaching these sales leads. You have already paid to get the lead through your door once, and now you can run a cost-effective Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) campaign.
Your next step is maximizing exposure at the customer's point of interest, which can be very cost-effective and well defined through search marketing, especially when your market has tightly identifiable search terms. One of the beauties of this channel is its pay-per-use pricing model, meaning you pay for the media only when the searcher clicks on your ad and visits your website. The second huge benefit is the ability to geotarget your advertising, which is ideal since you have already tightly defined your audience's specific geography.
Your Future
These tactics refocus on satisfying demand rather than generating interest and awareness, and are not a roadmap for future growth. But they will allow you to begin maximizing some resources you already have or should have, and leave you with an energized customer list and clearer view of your market.