When I meet other business people they no longer ask “How are you?”, they furrow their brows and ask “How’s business? Has the downturn hit you yet?”. Well obviously there are challenges around but I refuse to batten down the hatches, weep, wail and put my head in my hands. Here’s why.
If you are a major player like Ford or M&S the recession is going to hurt. When you have a market dominant position and your market shrinks by 30% you can’t make up a difference of that magnitude by increasing market share, you cut back or go bust. However if you are a small business with a small share of the market it’s more straightforward. If you are a good company, with decent products then you grab a bit more market share. If you can go from 0.05% of your market to 0.06% you’ll be fine!
Over the easy times that have applied over the past 10 or 15 years good businesses have done very well and poor ones have done OK. Over the next couple of years good businesses will do OK and those that don’t get their act together will go under and release the market share the rest of us need to do OK. If there’s anything good about a downturn it’s that it clears out dead wood and forces those businesses capable of improvement to improve.
So, get as close as possible to your customers, showing them you care, asking their opinions and acting on them. Be aware that your competition will be trying to prise them away from you, so head off their moves with special deals, loyalty bonuses, long term contracts.
Keep up your marketing activities but examine everything for effectiveness. If your competitors scale down this is your chance to grab some of their business. Examine your marketing message and tweak it to emphasise value for money and cost savings. Use lower cost options such as email marketing to get more activity for your budget. Make sure your website is properly visible in search engines and convinces visitors they should do business with you.
So how does this apply to a web marketing business like NetSecrets? The first thing is to practise what we preach and review everything we do to make sure we are operating at top efficiency. Then we have to publicise the ways the internet can help other businesses prosper in difficult times and that will bring in the business we need to keep growing. The most important elements include:
Make sure that your website is up to scratch. Just by doing that you can probably replace any reduction in your market so don’t leave it to some enthusiastic amateur just because they are cheap, use an expert who can ensure your potential clients can find your site and that the site’s content is slick enough to persuade the visitors to become prospects and then customers.
Create email marketing campaigns but use a professional system to deliver the messages so you can be sure a high percentage of the emails get through to their target and get read. If you cobble something together in Outlook as few as 30% of the emails will arrive and most of those won’t get read. Get this right and you can keep in closer touch with your existing customers, even including client surveys in newsletters, and you can also target specific groups of prospective clients.
Finally look at using Web 2.0 or social networking to publicise your business. By this I mean create a blog that can spread your company and product news far and wide. Create a group on Facebook and get your clients and prospects to participate. Learn as much as much as you can about this fast growing medium and get in before your competitors.
In conclusion the complacent and the incapable will fall by the wayside. Those of us who take the right actions will make up the shortfall at their expense and be set fair to grow significantly in a couple of years when good times return. Easy as that!
