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The times are tough, not only in America but also in other countries that are feeling the effects of the stalling U.S. economy. While no one really wants to talk and listen about it anymore, marketing is one of the last sectors you should cut from your budget. When the ride becomes rough, it is time to do more marketing and promotion than ever before, because these efforts can actually save money.
In This Post:
Promotion and marketing broken down
Marketing is a circular process with many steps. It begins with studying your consumers as well as potential consumers, breaking them into groups, studying their habits and asking each group what they expect from you. Once you have that information, you can create products or services that cater to each group and promote them so the people know they are in stock.
As a final move, you should ask the customers if they are content with your products or services. You can use this feedback to improve your offering and then re-launch and re-promote, completing the cycle of continually improving your services and meeting your customers’ demands. We will use this marketing cycle scheme to see where we can save time and money.
Use customer feedback to see which services to cut
The scenario is familiar to every company: as soon as someone proposes cutting a service, another staff member comes out with reasons why eliminating that service might be bad. In the end, nothing is cut and no buck is saved. The truth is that organisations liquidate or change their offering all the time. Your objective should be to push on with what is most sought after and dump the rest overboard. And how can you know what the safe card is? By marketing. When you combine actual customer feedback and statistics about usage, you’ll have a solid proof of what your winning service is.
Speak their language
Studies have shown that people who are unfamiliar with your offering constantly ask for something new and innovative even though you might already have that in your offer. The product or service might be packaged and advertised differently than they would expect, but whatever it is that they want, there’s a chance that you’ve already got it. If you say that you have an online catalogue, for some people it isn’t the same as ‘a list of available products on the internet’. By studying each of your customer groups, you can learn how they speak and think so you can communicate with them more clearly.
Let your website do the heavy lifting
It can be overwhelming to have more clients visit in person when your staff budget is faltering. Make sure your customers know how to use your website to solve their issues. For you, it might come naturally to browse through the catalogue, see the discounts and ask about specific products or services, but believe it or not, many people are still not aware of capabilities of a good e-store website. Unless you promote your website loudly and frequently, you are wasting the resources you invested in the online presence. One non-aggressive way of promoting your website is by presenting your first-time customers with promotional usb drives with your URL on the backside. They will circulate around and your customers will surely find them useful.
When the economy enters the calm waters, it’s never okay to cut back on your marketing. Although spending time and money on these ‘soft methods’ might seem silly when you’re cutting on your workforce, if used correctly, these strategies can both save you money and eventually help you earn more once the wind catches the sails again.
