Cutting Your Budget? Read This First
Slowing Economy Is Impacting Marketing Budgets For Small Business
Be Strategic About Budget Adjustments
With gas prices rising, we have all felt some degree of financial pressure.
Many of my advertising colleagues are telling me that their clients are cutting back or completely cutting out their marketing budgets due to current economic conditions.
If you are planning to lower your marketing budget in the next few months, there are several issues that you must consider regarding how you go about making those changes.
Let’s review one of Teakwood Marketing’s basic premises which comes straight out of the Marketing Accelerator™ Workbook #201.
To succeed in your marketing efforts, you must have a relevant message that is delivered on a consistent basis with adequate frequency and a degree of variety to continue to attract the prospect.
To understand where to make changes, let’s break that down.
Relevant
Your message must be relevant to the prospect or else it is not worth spending money on. If you believe your current message is relevant and effective, then don’t spend money now on changing or updating it. If your message is no longer relevant, change it fast or else you haven’t even felt the bite of the slowing economy yet.
Consistent
Is your message being delivered consistently at all of your prospect touch points? By touch points, I mean all of the places that your prospects and customers have an interaction with you such as your website, packaging, brochures, direct mail, radio, TV, customer service, etc. If so, then don’t change anything. If not, this is an area that you hold back on until your business is on more sound footing.
Frequent
Are you delivering your message with adequate frequency? Business owners think of cutting back on frequency first. This can be very dangerous.
Frequency is to advertising like breathing is to living.
Slower markets typically present an opportunity to increase market share because your competition has generally cut back. The Chinese definition of “crisis” is opportunity on a dangerous wind. If you have a strong marketing system already in place, savvy business owners see the opportunity of increasing advertising during the period when the competition is lessening their presence. I would not recommend lowering the frequency.
Variety
The final element of a strategic marketing plan is to engage a degree of variety that continues to attract the prospects. Just like a new sign in the store window causes passer bys to look, after 30 days, the sign becomes part of the un-noticed landscape. However, if your message is relevant, this is an area that can wait until your marketing budget has been refilled.
