Display, promote, billboard yourself!
Brandability – the ability to look good and stand out from the crowd that makes you memorable, recognisable and relatable
The world is in upheaval what with Brexit, Trump, and closer to home everything resting on the upcoming elections. While the tendency in tough or changing times is to reign in your spending when it comes to business marketing, this could well be the very worst approach you could possibly take.
Did you know that when organisations continue to promote their products and/or services during a downturn, they end up showing better performance over the long term than many of their competitors? Taking the approach that you should continue to advertise aggressively when times are uncertain has elicited sales that were as much as 256% higher, once the economy recovered than those companies, businesses or organisations that shrank back from their target market.
If you’re heading up a team in a big corporation or running your own establishment as a risk-taking entrepreneur, you’ll need grit and determination – as well as skill and precision – to get through the tough times that lie ahead. Two important points, say the experts at Display Mania, are that you don’t reduce your marketing budget and that you make sure your customers receive the very best service when the marketplace is dicey.
Think about your competition: will they be cutting back on marketing spend at this time? If you keep going, in both an effective and a specific manner, you’ll be way ahead when markets turn. “Remember always to stay visible, out in the marketplace and online via your website, and to challenge your competition – perhaps by cutting back in ways that reduce luxuries but don’t put you out of sight and mind of those buying what you’re offering,” they advise.
In fact, the spokesperson at Display Mania says you should continue to fight both to keep your existing clients and to wow new ones. “Flexibility, reliability and efficiency are of the essence at times like this,” they enthuse. It’s also worth doing some reading up, they say, about how other companies have coped – even thrived – through a recession or other corporate challenge.
In the Harvard Business School paper “Marketing your way through a recession”, the point is made that the key to success is to “understand how the needs of your customers and partners change, and [to] adapt your strategies to the new reality”. So this is the time to increase market share and return on investment; it’s the time to offer discounts to loyal and new clients, and it’s also the time for CEOs to prioritise relationship-building and staff-motivational speeches.
How are you going to continue to put your message out there into an often tough marketplace? There are an almost unlimited variety of ways to do so.
