“I keep marketing for the same reason a pilot keeps his engines running once he gets off the ground.”

This quote – attributed to William Wrigley Jr., the founder of Wrigley Company – dovetails with a point that my colleague Debra Murphy recently made. In her Vista Viewpoint article entitled ‘10 Strategic Marketing Mistakes’, Deb makes the case that companies need to continue to market even when the economy is bad. Sounds great, but how do you do it when money is tight?

Much has been written about how businesses can promote themselves without buying Super Bowl ads or hiring Tiger Woods as a spokesperson. “Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World” by Shel Horowitz and Nancy Michaels’ “Off the Wall Marketing Ideas: Jumpstart Your Sales without Busting Your Budget” are just two examples of the many books written on this topic. Less has been written, however, on what to do in those times – such as the end of the quarter or end of the year – when you have put your marketing budget on temporary hold but still need to make the most efficient use of your marketing resources.

So, with apologies to Fleetwood Mac, this article will explore ways that marketing organizations can keep “thinking about tomorrow” even when they are at a phase without a budget to work with.

Know Thy Customer

How well do you know your customers? Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many of your customers are financial services companies with under 50 employees, or how many customers purchase products A &B but not C?

If you have a handful of customers you might know this off the top of your head. Once your customer base reaches multiple tens or hundreds or even thousands, memory alone will no longer suffice. Answering these questions – and doing analysis against your customer base – now requires a database that is populated with clean data as a critical element of your marketing infrastructure. If your company has been diligent at collecting this information all along, you may pass “Go” and collect your $200. If you are like most companies and the customer database isn’t fully populated or is out of date, now is a good time to dedicate resources to update the database. Doing so takes three steps:

1.  Decide on what information you need to capture.

The specifics on the important data to gather will vary from company to company and the process of designing the database will take some effort. Some fields to consider include:

• Industry Classification – you may want to use SIC or NAICS codes for company classification if you want to perform very fine granular analysis, however for most people a looser industry classification will suffice.  Note that if you use a your own classification system, be sure you standardize the data fields so you don’t end up with some companies listed as “Fin. Svcs” while others are listed as “Financial Services”.
• Location – neighborhood, city, state or country depending on your size
• Revenue and Profit
• Number of employees
• Product(s) purchased and Purchase date(s)

2. Have your team gather the information and populate the database.

This often times proves more difficult than it would appear. If you sell to public companies, then most of the information is readily accessible. If you sell to private companies however, some of the information will be harder to obtain. The customer web site is always the first place to start, with secondary sources like Hoovers a valuable asset.

3. Put a process in place so this information is captured at the point of sale so you don’t need to go though this again in the future.

Of all the internally focused activities you can do that don’t require spending money, this may be the most valuable. Spending time to do this can provide invaluable insights into customer buying patterns, and help serve as input to marketing and sales campaigns once you again are spending money.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

How well do your customers know you? The business world is full of stories of customers who didn’t make a purchase because they didn’t know that the company they already had a relationship with offered a product or service they needed. Regular communication with customers and prospects is one way to help make sure that doesn’t happen to you – and email marketing makes it cost effective. If you don’t have a regular newsletter, create one … NOW.

Companies like Roving Software (www.rovingsoftware.com), iMakeNews (www.imakenews.com) and infacta (www.infacta.com) have great tools for running email campaigns. Offering an opt-in email newsletter, capturing email addresses when you make a sale and providing a way to register on your website, provides a ready made list of people who WANT you to communicate with them. Note that in a world where spam is becoming a greater and greater problem, customer acquisition via email is more and more difficult – but email is proving to be an effective tool for customer retention.

Two words of caution are in order:

• If you commit to regular communication with your customers, realize that this will take resources not only in your down time, but when you are busy as well. Before embarking down this path make sure that you are committed to keep up the effort in future months.
• Make sure that you do not become an inadvertent spammer. Clearly spell out what people are signing up for, and make sure that you have an easy opt-out system for those who no longer want to receive your newsletter.

The Tangled Webs We Weave

Your web site is one of the most important ways to communicate the elements of your marketing framework to the outside world. However, most websites grow organically over time and do not always contain the latest company messages. For example:

• Product pages get created and forgotten about.
• Customer success stories are written and left alone.
• Company information pages get stale.

Does this describe your website? If so, spending time walking through the site to spot inconsistencies and dated information is time well spent. Having people work in teams and creating a small prize to the group that finds (and fixes) the most problems can turn this into a low cost way to make sure your external image is as consistent as possible while at the same time building team unity.

People – Your Most Valuable Resource

Down times are excellent times to focus on staff development. While you may not have a budget for external training, having the team cross train each other can accomplish several objectives. Having people explain their job function to a colleague forces them to think deeper about how they do their job. Unthreatening peer review can provide food for thought for employees on how to do things better. Structuring this training in a presentation format gives people additional presentation and public speaking experience – something that is valuable for everyone. Lastly, having people better understand the functions of the entire organization can give you a deeper bench, better able to respond when people are out of the office or leave the company.

Don’t Stop

Don’t stop, thinking about tomorrow,

Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here,

It’ll be, better than before,

Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.