This is the first of a series of posts that stems from a seminar I’ve given a couple of times recently. ‘Marketing Your Way Out Of A Downturn’, which was an update of ‘When The Going Gets Tough, Get Marketing!’, looked at what it will take to outperform your competitors during a recession. In this post and the ones that follow, I’ll talk about some of the key ideas from those seminars.
As the people who came to the seminars talked about their situations, it was clear that they had realised not only the importance of marketing now that we’re in a crunch, but that their marketing hadn’t been up to scratch before the crunch happened. Difficult economic times expose that weakness.
The good news is that a lot of the things that you need to do in a recession are the good marketing things you should have been doing anyway. You just need to do them with a greater sense of urgency and focus.
Even if you had a well-defined value proposition before the recession began, you’ll need to revisit it now. Why? Because your customers are thinking differently. The way they buy, how they make their decisions, and the language they’ll respond to may all have changed. And you may need to find customers in different parts of the market, with a new or redfined offering.
For example, I’m still doing the same thing with my clients as I was six months ago – helping each of them to create and execute a better business strategy – but back then we talked mostly about growth, and now we talk more about stability. So that language is being fed into how I market my business.
Getting inside the head of your customers, and seeing your world as they see it, is one of the fundamentals of good marketing. Their perception is your reality.
So, revisit your value proposition, and make sure it passes the “So What?” test for the times we live in, and the customers you want to acquire right now.
For some initial help on creating your value proposition, see www.goldsbrough.biz/value-proposition.
There’ll be more from these seminars over the next few days. If you find this information helpful, e-mail it to a friend.