Top Tips on Surviving & Thriving the Recession
Clear Marketing's Tips on Surviving & Thriving the Recession
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Market knowledge and intelligence is an obvious, but extremely under utilised, strategic business tool. Our number one tip to businesses is therefore to spend time learning about and understanding the environment in which you operate. Keep abreast of internal and external changes, such as costs of materials; customer behaviour; competitor's products, services and prices; to ensure that you maximise opportunities and minimise threats.
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Understand what makes your business different and develop your unique selling proposition (USP). Combine this knowledge with identifing target customers, to develop tailored and focused activities. The secret here is to integrate all communications to create one consistent message, which everyone in your business buys into and features within their own verbal and written communications.
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Understand your customers/clients and prospects. Develop/use a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system to understand customer needs and target sales efforts to optimise profitable customer groups.
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Communicate with your customers/clients. Develop two-way communications with the, listen to their needs, encourage feedback and work together to overcome issues. Value, develop and retain your customers / clients, remembering that it's far easier and cheaper to get more business from existing customers than it is to get new ones.
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Think ‘value' not ‘volume' and measure ‘profit' not ‘sales'. It's important that you consider the lifetime value of your customers/clients and the value they can add to your business, if they are satisfied and retained over time.
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Control and measure all marketing activities to ensure they add value. Marketing is very important in a recession, but that doesn't mean that you need to waste money. Two key tips are therefore to measure the cost of customer acquisition against value generated and take appropriate action. Secondly, take time to measure the effectiveness of previous activities and learn from your own experiences. If they worked for you in the past then do not be afraid to repeat, modify and refine the activity. If they didn't, try something different, or stop undertkaing that activity.
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Communicate success! A really easy way to build trust and creditability is to obtain and communicate testimonials and recommendations from existing customers/clients.
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Consider the key reasons why your customers buy from you or your competitors, and then develop your service proposition to meet those needs. The implementation of a returns or customer satisfaction policy reduces the perception of risk for many buyers, whilst increasing the perception of quality and value.
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Stick to the knitting! A recession is a great opportunity to review your product and/or service range and focus on what your business does best. Cut back on any high risk, low profit areas where demand is declining, instead concentrate resources on high value, profitable areas within the business.
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Invest in the future! Did you know that businesses who invest during economic down times are statistically proven not only to survive, but are actually shown to develop and thrive.
