How to Market Profitably during a Recession
Keep new clients coming in the door and get more sales from current ones with these inside secrets of savvy businesspeople
by MaryEllen Tribby | Published in April 2009 managers' corner | Departments
It’s one of the cruel ironies of business. When the economy’s bad, you need to pull out all the stops to reel in new clients and extract more sales from current ones. At the same time, your gut is telling you to conserve money. Which message should a businessperson listen to?
Both.
You don’t have to spend a ton to ensure that your marketing message is heard. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to sell during a recession. Here are a few critical dos and don’ts.
Do send out an e-mail newsletter. Collect the e-mail address of every client who walks through your door. Your e-newsletter will keep your best clients coming back, and sending it doesn’t have to be expensive. My company, Early to Rise (ETR), uses GetResponse to e-mail over 440,000 subscribers for only $17
per month.
Do try your hand at online PR. If you have a new product coming out, announce it online. Write an informative press release with contact info that leads back to your website. Remember, not too many people will be interested in reading only about your business, so link your news with a hot topic of the day. Then submit it to online press release sites like PRWeb.com or Free-Press-Release.com.
For example, I interviewed Newt Gingrich in March 2007. Immediately after the interview, ETR posted a press release to several online press distribution services and uploaded comments about the interview to news-aggregating services, blogs and political forums (with a back-link to the release posted in an archive).
Within weeks, website visits and traffic ranking more than doubled and conversion also showed a spike. Three months later, the release was still being picked up by the media and through syndication, and the website where it was archived was enjoying residual traffic and back-links.
Do hold teleconferences. Anybody can pick up a phone and start talking. That’s the key to using teleconferences to promote your business. Find an industry expert to interview, arrange a number for your clients to call in (for free or a modest fee), offer another product to your clients during the call and record the call (which you can sell later).
My own company does teleconferences that cost less than $1 per attendee to produce, and we had one that brought in $330,000.
Do participate in joint ventures. Leverage your relationships with like-minded businesses in your niche or related industries. These joint ventures involve working together to promote each other’s products, with each side taking a split of the profit.
When joint venturing, look for businesses with skills or resources you lack. Make sure each side’s contribution is equal and decided in advance. Make agreements simple, but put them in writing. The idea is to create partnerships that are easy to maintain, financially lucrative and long-lasting.
Don’t overplan. The worst thing you can do in business is overplan, endlessly tweaking until everything is “just right.” Just do something and get your product or marketing effort out there. There’s plenty of time to improve after you’ve seen what the market wants.
Here at ETR, we debated for several days over the title of a new book. The publisher needed it ASAP, so we took our top three candidates and put them online on a separate pay-per-click ad for each title. By tracking how many clicks each ad got, we found our title.
Don’t overspend. You don’t need to overextend your budget, hire an expensive consultant or spend thousands to build your website. Cheap freelancers are easy to find. And most of this work you can — and should — be doing yourself.
Don’t fall in love with your ideas. Be ready to start over with new marketing copy or a new product if the market tells you to — i.e., if nobody buys.
The bottom line? Marketing your business is a simple matter of following proven formulas and executing methodically. In recessions, people tend to panic, choosing expensive or ill-suited marketing vehicles (bad), or stopping marketing altogether (worse).
Don’t be one of them. Stay focused. Keep sending your message out, relentlessly. When the recession ends, you’ll be glad you kept a cool head about you.
About the author: MaryEllen Tribby
Guest columnist MaryEllen Tribby is the publisher and CEO of free e-mail newsletter Early to Rise (earlytorise.com). She coauthored “Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business” (Wiley, 2008) with Michael Masterson.
Contact: mtribby@agoralearning.com