Continue to Generate Leads
When revenues head south, sales forecasts are bleak and the economy is in recession, the reaction of many technology CEOs is to cut expenses. All too often, it’s the marketing budget that takes a direct hit.
This quick-fix mentality overlooks the fact that marketing is not a short-term activity. It’s the companies that steadily build and refine multiple marketing programs that enjoy sustainable success. And the most successful marketing programs are the ones that improve the quantity and quality of leads that flow into your organization.
By brutally shutting off the tap, you not only cut off your lead flow, you also lose significant momentum. When you’re finally ready to turn the tap back on, it’ll likely be a long time before you can convert a trickle of leads into the steady stream your sales team is expecting. Once the economy is back on its feet, your sales may not accelerate at the speed you need to keep your organization competitive.
Be Selective
Good marketers continually measure their key marketing programs. This means they can take the time to assess the impact of budget cuts before implementing them. . When you make a habit of measuring your successes and failures, it’s easier to understand which programs are working best, and which should perhaps be dropped or postponed. Armed with this knowledge, you can make informed decisions about downsizing your budgets without cutting the heart out of your lead generation engine.
Redeploy Resources
When you temporarily shrink your marketing programs, you also reduce your marketing team’s activities. Don’t take this as an automatic cue to trim headcount. When the economy eventually turns the corner, you’re going to need these people again. They’ve spent time getting to know your company and your product. Don’t waste this valuable investment.
Even in a downturn, you can keep these people gainfully employed. There are many low-to-no-cost activities that your marketing department can consider implementing to compensate for the cuts you have made elsewhere:
Start a blog and let all your customers and prospects know about it. It’s a great way to demonstrate industry and domain expertise, show prospects that you understand the challenges they are facing, and have solutions to address them.
Syndicate your blog and your web site with an RSS feed. That way, every time you make a content addition or change, your RSS subscribers get an update automatically.
Take advantage of sharing tools like sharethis (http://www.sharethis.com), that facilitate the dissemination of content like press releases, product announcements etc. to your various network locations simultaneously (your blog, email lists, facebook page etc.)
Start an email newsletter. But don’t treat it like another advertising vehicle. Make sure it contains content that is useful and/or educational. Use it in conjunction with your blog to establish a thought leadership position in your industry. And remember, you can likely use some of the content you create for the blog in the newsletter and vice versa. And remember to put a subscription field on your web site.
Kick off an email based lead nurturing program to gently coax that pile of none sales-ready leads you have into sales readiness.
Take the time freed up by postponed marketing activities to do a candid review your web site. Does it speak to your prospects? Does it speak to their challenges, in language that resonates with them? Does it provide them with content they are searching for? Does it offer varied value-added content that people will give up their contact details to download? If not, change it.
Do the same review for your Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns. Cut the outlying ad groups that aren’t converting and refresh/extend the ones that are.
If you haven’t already done so - and few marketers truly have - analyze the ratio of PPC conversions to closed deals, to ensure that you have a clear view of which conversions are delivering. Use this new intelligence to further refine your PPC program.
Ensure that your most popular PPC keyword phrases are reflected in your web site to improve your search engine optimization. The sooner you can get good organic ranking for phrases you are currently paying for, the sooner you can stop paying for them!
Get your marketing folk to do phone follow-up on some of the more tepid leads they have generated over the last little while. It’s a great way for them to understand why sales sometimes rejects the fruits of their labours and make them think about how to do a better job of identifying sales ready prospects in the future.
Once you’ve done all this, if you’ve still got time on your hands, use it to work out whether you can leverage facebook as a B2B marketing tool. I’m still trying to work that one out. If you have any insight on the topic, I’d love to hear from you. And as soon as I have something concrete to share, you’ll be the first to know.
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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads -www.funnelbuilders.com