If you believe the pundits on CNBC and read the business section of your local newspaper, like millions of Americans you fear our struggling economy is on life support and most of us are close to defaulting on our mortgages.
As an active investor and business owner, I’ve experienced my share of bear and bull markets. While it’s impossible to forecast the future, I can quote a study from the Stock Trader’s Almanac 2008 to give you some perspective. According to the almanac, presidential elections have a profound impact on the economy and the stock market.
Wars, recessions and bear markets tend to start or occur during the first half of a new presidential term. Bull markets and prosperity normally reign during the latter half. In fact, when you compare the last two years of the 44 administrations since 1833, the stock market has delivered a total net gain of 745.9%, dwarfing the 227.6% gain during the first two years of those administrations.
While it’s common for people to panic and sell their investments for huge losses at the very time they should be adding to their positions, many company management teams make the same mistake by panicking when the economy gets a little choppy. Have you noticed how many companies are reducing headcount these days? I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the same companies are also dramatically cutting their sales, marketing, advertising and public relations budgets, too.
That strategy, my friends, is exactly what your competition is hoping you’ll do. Savvy marketers often increase their budgets during recessionary periods when the economy looks the bleakest because the companies that shout the loudest are usually the ones that grab the lion’s share of business when the economy comes roaring back.
During the 2002 economic downturn, I wrote about Adrian Slywotsky’s classic book, Value Migration. According to Slywotsky, the biggest mistake most business owners make is approaching business as if it’s a poker game. I believed back then (and still do) that running a business is more like chess, where the key to success is developing a strategy, recognizing patterns and thinking several moves ahead of the competition.
That was the strategy Tech Image deployed in 2003. As our business began to recover from the dot-com meltdown, we hired a full-time business development manager, updated our website, created a new brochure and started promoting our company with the same zeal as we do for our clients. Today we are Chicago’s leading independent technology PR firms and were named “Best Boutique PR Firm to Work for” in 2006 and 2007 by The Holmes Report in recognition of our senior-level staff and extremely high employee retention and satisfaction ratings.
I’m not telling you this to brag, but to provide some food for thought if your CFO is breathing down your back about cutting mission-critical promotional and marketing programs.
Instead of reducing your budgets, now is a good time to fine-tune your programs to position your company for success. My colleagues and I took a few moments to brainstorm on successful strategies that savvy marketers should consider implementing today. Try these on for size:
- Talk to your customers and learn ways your product or service can help make them more successful;
- Help your customers and business partners network with successful vendors and potential clients;
- Challenge your PR departments to provide tangible evidence of ROI for their programs (web-based dashboards that link results to sales leads and web traffic can make this process fairly painless);
- Develop a comprehensive social networking strategy that complements existing sales and marketing campaigns. While business-to-business companies are just beginning to embrace social media, it is easy to experiment with free or almost free tools like blogs, podcasts, wikis and social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn. Create a social networking taskforce at your company and be sure to include some of your youngest employees on this team – they’re the ones that are using these tools right now;
- Monitor but don’t obsess with what the competition is doing. This might be a perfect time to make a mid-course correction in your program;
- Schedule a briefing with key industry analysts to discuss your market space and gauge their perceptions on your company and its competition. In conversation after conversation with folks at Gartner, Forrester and other industry analyst firms, we continually are told that many paid clients do not take advantage of the analyst access they are entitled to receive! Talk about wasting money;
- Study new vertical and geographic markets that may provide easy entry for one or more of your products or services;
- Update your messaging to make sure it is relevant and searchable on the web; and finally,
- Step back at look at your own products and services – what attributes make them a must have rather than “nice to have?”
Savvy investors like Warren Buffet get even wealthier when the economy takes a turn for the worse, and it should not surprise anyone that the stock price of WAL-MART has increased by nearly 30% in the last few months.
Charles Darwin might have summed it up best when he said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.”
I’m not worried – I’m adapting my business strategy to today’s market. How about you?
Anyway, that’s my two cents’ worth.
