With the recession, everyone in business has been looking to invest in branding, outreach and market development programs that are cost-effective.  Marketing during the recession is a way to position your business strongly for when the economy does pick.  Information technology plays an important role in getting the message out to your potential customers, but there are still some important do’s and don’t’s that will help to make any business’ marketing investment stronger. This blog starts with 10 simple ideas, some tried and true, some off the wall, and some, somewhere in between to guide small and medium businesses during the downswing so that they’re ready for the upswing.

1. Measure twice, invest once.
It’s the reinvention of an old adage, but it’s still true for businesses today. A year ago, businesses could take a few messages out to the public and see what stuck. Today, we have to focus on narrowing the message even more than we normally would. That puts the emphasis on solid research to understand the buyer, but it also puts the focus on low-cost tools that can help us conduct that research (e.g., using Google adwords and other paid search to understand what key words and messages have the greatest resonance with our audiences). It’s important to find the best message you can, since the budget to get that message out is probably going to shrink and you’re going to be increasingly reliant on viral marketing.

2. If it ain’t broke, be careful how you fix it.
Like a network, marketing requires continuous improvement, but once you have a good message, stick with it. With the downturn in the economy, one of the first suggestions that everyone making business decisions will hear from everyone else is: “maybe we need to change the message!” If your message has always focused on a solid value proposition that resonates with your buyer, there’s no reason to change your message at all. In fact, changing your message involves a lot of difficult to calculate costs in terms of your time, re-educating your buyers about what’s important about your offerings, and so on. If there’s no evidence that your message is the problem, don’t change it.

3. Focus on closing sales.
Your sales pipeline may stay constant or it may even increase depending on the kind of product or service you’re selling, but more than ever, closing the deal should be your mantra. Sales are what count in a recession (and even when it’s not a recession). Of course, leads are important, but every sales you close creates revenue that you can use to turn into generate new leads. Moreover, the cost to generate 100 leads may be much smaller than the cost to turn one of those leads into a sale — depending on your sales cycle.  Everyone in the organization should be looking for ways to help the sales team close deals. Role up your sleeves and get out there. Get involved in account plans if you company works through channel sales so that you can help your partners market themselves. If you’re company is more of a direct play, work with your organizational teams to identify, qualify and close key opportunities. Don’t take no for an answer!

4. Follow the buyer.
This is good advice even when it’s not a recession. Invest some time and research into learning more about how your buyers makes purchasing decisions, what sources of information they consider to be important, and which they take to be most credible. Most buyers, for example, don’t make major purchasing decisions about software by going at a tradeshow, and yet, many marketing professionals spend a great deal of time and capital investing in shows to drive awareness with the buyer. There’s nothing wrong with attending a tradeshow if you can afford it, but you should invest the most amount of capital you can reaching your buyer directly through media and venues they trust. Maybe that’s a tradeshow, but more likely, that’s a Wikipedia article, a YouTube video, a how-to blog article, and other Web 2.0 media.

5. Don’t just imitate.
Many senior marketing pros repeat what they learned while they were coming up through the ranks. There’s something to be said for the wisdom of experience and all that, but your tactics should be guided by what’s happening on the ground. The economy in North America has been largely on the rise for the last two decades, and that has meant more liberal spending. Buyers have been looking more at maximal value rather than optimal value. Relationships and convenience have been more meaningful buying criteria, but buying formulas are changing. The question is: how? If you’re not sure, work with your sales team to get out into the field as much as you can and get some empirical data.

6. Learn and adapt.
As a corollary to 5, put a renewed emphasis on your willingness to adapt. The recession will naturally affect everyone’s buying cycle as well as their criteria. If you don’t have a lot of experience with the micro- and macroeconomics of recession and how that affects buying, you can help yourself and your company with a little research. The importance of perceived value tends to go up in the minds of purchasers as the economy goes down, but it’s difficult to predict and depends on what you’re selling. You can also help yourself and your company by understanding what new objections there are to purchase decisions among your customers and thinking of new and creative ways to counter them.

7. Understand your brand.
This was a truism even before the recession, but every buyer knows that marketing is marketing and most buyers tend to treat marketing as white noise. In terms of branding, that has meant a turn toward minimalism (all those Nike ads without much Nike branding in them are a good example). To make use of a Zen koan, the focus has turned from the designing of the bowl itself, to understanding, designing and, indeed, inventing the space that the bowl creates and how that space is meaningful and useful to your customers. Today, your brand should much less reflect who you are, much more reflect who your customer wants to be because your business should be a happy marriage of the relationship between you and your customers.

8. Solve the right problem.
Once your house is in order, start looking at the rest of the pre-sales cycle. If sales are flagging, nine times out of ten, the problem’s not with the message; it’s with the delivery. A successful pre-sales cycle that takes the customer from cold lead to closed deal is a matter of making sure things fall into place as they should when they should. You can’t solve an awareness problem with better messaging. You can’t solve an interest problem just by throwing more money into promotion. You can’t solve a channel relationship problem with more creative and compelling advertising. You can’t solve product problems with a blog. Understand the company’s pre-sales (and if you can, its post-sales) proceses inside and out, figure out which problems are a real impediment to sales, and press as much as you can to address these problems with the right solutions.

9. Remember, you’re also always branding, marketing and selling yourself.
If one thing is true about being being in business, whether you’re an entrepreneur, in sales or marketing, or a little of all three, it’s that you’re always having to prove yourself. Sales proves itself with closed deals. Development proves itself with a working product. Operations proves itself with working processes and supply chain. Customer service proves itself with happy customers and closed cases. How are you proving your worth to your customers? Web traffic, leads and other traditional marketing KPIs may not be enough anymore. Look to the successes in other organizations and build a clear, compelling story about how your leadership was necessary to make every other organization in the company successful. Closed deals indicate a strong, easily understood value proposition, articulated in ways customers understand and value. A good, working product that customers value indicates a proper understanding of and response to customer needs. Happy customers mean correctly set expectations, and so on.

10. Focus on the three Rs: reputation, repetition and refinement.
Once you have a formula that’s getting you traction, don’t be content to rest on your laurels. Continue to focus on building your reputation with potential buyers, continue to repeat everything that’s working for you, but also discard what’s not working. It’s true that the problem with marketing is that you can’t always know what will work, but you can always know what’s not working. Build a reputation for yourself as someone who makes highly creative, intuitive decisions, but also as someone who relies on the measurable numbers and strong analytical skills to contextualize the numbers in order to inform those decisions. If something’s not working, dump it and move on.