Recession Creates Opportunity – Invest in Marketing that Builds Assets

I talked to a medium-sized company today that was having some difficulty with their content marketing efforts. After about five minutes it was easy to see why.

The print newsletter and “magalog” were owned by customer service. The five enewsletters were ultimately managed by IT. White papers, eBooks and annual reports were executed by marketing. The website was split up between IT, marketing and sales. And no one was responsible for listening to the customer through social media tools. Frankly, most of the attention was still going to trade shows, direct mail and telemarketing.

Lots of wasted time and resources. Everything was being measured individually and no person had the power to bring the teams together. The worst part? – everyone was so worried about their little piece of the pie, no one was paying attention to the informational needs of the customer (Twitter? – what’s that?).

Things are about to change because now they have no choice. Sometimes a recession creates opportunity.

What’s Your Opportunity?

Every company, no matter the size, has marketing processes or strategies that used to make sense in the past, but now just don’t work.

In the good times, these processes go on because a little bit of waste is okay, tolerated or ignored altogether.

In times like these, your marketing can’t afford waste.

Look at your marketing and do the following:

1. Take a hard look at what’s working and what’s not working.  You will probably find marketing that builds an asset is performing better (your website, your white papers, your videos – things that help you tell your story). Marketing that is created and disappears (online display, print ads, etc. – things that are difficult to tell a story) are either not performing as well or you aren’t sure what it’s doing.
2. Disregard relationships and well-worn marketing paths. You can’t afford to play nice anymore. Make the hard decisions now when the opportunity is in front of you (Yes, you can finally fire that person/contractor/agency).
3. Don’t pocket all the marketing dollars you are cutting.  Reinvest a portion of those savings into assets and stories – your web content, your enewsletter content, your informational products, your “customer listening” staff. Focus on being the trusted solutions provider for your industry – invest in products that do just that.
4. Address duplicate content issues. (courtesy of Natanya Anderson) Many times we find that several groups in a company are trying to address the same content needs, but through their unique lenses (and not typically through the customers’ lens). They are all telling a very similar story and creating multiple, redundant assets, none of which really meet the end-user’s needs. If companies can centralize these efforts and make the focus of the asset development the user, they will most likely be able to create a single asset that performs well.
5. Execute.

The companies that take advantage of this great opportunity will be leading their industries after the dust settles.

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