Successful Marketing During an Economic Downturn
Marketing your business during a downturn: One local consultant shares tips on staying afloat
October 4, 2011
Dana Zurbuchen knows how tough times are for business owners these days – but she’s not the type of person who’s willing to lie down and accept defeat.
As a local marketing coach and consultant, Zurbuchen, who will speak at the Oct. 11 American Marketing Association (AMA) Madison meeting on “Successful (and Cost Effective) Marketing During a Downturn,” has seen the struggles of the business community up close, but she doesn’t believe that a bad economy necessarily augurs bad economic outcomes. Success, she says, is often just a matter of facing your issues head-on.
“A lot of times, people don’t always want to admit that they have an ugly baby,” said Zurbuchen of some business owners’ marketing efforts. “Everyone thinks that their baby is beautiful. Where in fact, you might have an ugly baby, and you know, that’s okay. Because if you don’t acknowledge that, you can’t do anything to improve the situation. Stop putting your head in the sand, stop assuming that your salespeople are doing their follow-up, stop assuming that because you have one truck on the road, everyone knows who you are.
“We as business owners often have our egos in front of our sensibility when it comes to marketing: ‘I’m the best and everyone knows me.’ No, they don’t. I’m really sorry to tell you, they don’t. They’re involved in their own lives.”
Indeed, Zurbuchen’s infectious enthusiasm belies a tough-love approach to marketing that, first and foremost, demands that business owners allow themselves to be open to opportunities to do things differently. During her presentation to the AMA, she will give case studies of businesses around the country that prospered in spite of the economy, thanks in no small part to their marketing efforts.
One such business, Rockweiler Insulation, is one of Zurbuchen’s clients. Given its obvious ties to the real estate market, one would think it would have been a candidate for precipitous decline, if not extinction. But by overhauling its approach to marketing, it saw a 20% increase in its sales over two years – near the beginning of the economic downturn.
“A lot of other people were closing their doors, and even some of their colleagues in their industry in different markets were shocked to hear those numbers,” said Zurbuchen.
Principally, Rockweiler shifted its focus from sports advertising and other male-targeted advertising – places where the business owners were likely to hear their own ads – to more female-centered advertising efforts.
“A lot of times, women are the ones who make the phone calls,” said Zurbuchen. “Not all the time, but women can more likely be the ones who are going to be home when the contractor comes to do an estimate. So we changed our marketing, focusing on women, and tightened up our budgets.”
Rockweiler also took advantage of some of the free and low-cost marketing tools that are available to all businesses, including social media and various place pages. These cost-effective tools will be a primary focus of Zurbuchen’s presentation next Tuesday.
For example, one thing that businesses can do immediately to improve their prospects is claim and update their Google Places page and set up a Facebook page.
“There are a lot of free resources online,” said Zurbuchen. “There’s a lot of free marketing you can do, from Facebook to local marketing to Google Places and Yahoo! There are a lot of free online resources that businesses can take advantage of that they’re not currently using. They can use some of these local business place pages, as they’re called on search engines, to set up a microsite and provide different, more targeted information to customers who may never ever come to your website and who might find you other places online.”
Of course, in this day and age, setting up a Facebook page might seem like a no-brainer, but it still might be an afterthought – or a daunting task – to some.
“You’d be surprised how many people don’t know, or don’t know how to do it,” said Zurbuchen. “Especially business owners who didn’t grow up in the age of technology, who didn’t start their business career using email, and, frankly, that’s a lot of people. There are a lot of people who don’t know about it, and they’re definitely not going to know about it if marketing is not the focus of their business.”
But just because these tools are accessible and relatively easy to use doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take them seriously, said Zurbuchen.
For one thing, it’s a big mistake to just let your niece or grandson run your Facebook page if they don’t know marketing. Also, it’s important to be diligent about your efforts.
“I know in my first company, when I first got a website, I thought, well, thank God that’s done, and it was left alone forever,” said Zurbuchen. “So the idea behind doing any kind of marketing anymore is you need to stay on top of it because people are looking for you and finding you 24/7/365. So it’s important to really make the commitment to stay on top of it.”
Making the most of the Web
Indeed, because people are always searching for products and services online, Zurbuchen recommends also using search engine marketing to ensure your company doesn’t get lost in the Web. To that end, it can often be helpful to solicit the aid of a company that specializes in SEM.
“People may know [Rockweiler Insulation’s] name, but at this time of year they start thinking about energy efficiency, and it’s cold in the house, and they might need more insulation,” said Zurbuchen. “In those types of industries where people are searching either for general information or possibly for a business, and may not have somebody in mind, [an Internet search] is a great place to show up. It’s almost like, if you’re a business that used to get a lot of business from the Yellow Pages, you have got to have a search engine marketing program because people now aren’t going to that Yellow Pages book, they’re going online.”
Of course, it’s also important to make sure that tried-and-true marketing principles don’t fall by the wayside in the wake of new technology, says Zurbuchen.
“When I talked earlier about being from a certain generation that didn’t really grow up with the Internet, well, there’s a younger generation that grew up so much in the Internet that they don’t understand customer service,” said Zurbuchen. “So there’s really the two parts of marketing – there’s the online marketing component where people are looking all the time for you, truly you’re always on display there, and then once they find you, there’s the internal customer service side of things. And regardless of the generation, you typically need help on one of the two.”
But while effective marketing can help some businesses thrive even during tough times, these strategies are important to keep in mind in any economic climate.
“These are things that should be done all the time, but because there was so much coming in before, it didn’t matter if I didn’t get all the sales because once I hung up this call, the phone was going to be ringing again,” said Zurbuchen. “That’s not the case now, and it’s really about going back to the basics and really the foundation of marketing, not being afraid of it, and having the information in the right place, and when the customer comes, treating them right. ... It really is pretty basic. It’s just telling everybody, ‘Settle down, and let’s get started on the stuff that needs to be there.’”