Artisan Blog

If the economic news has you holding your head in your hands, you’re not alone. For some businesses, the gloom and doom headlines of the past two weeks are translating into cancelled projects, uncertain contracts, slower consumer spending, clients getting gun-shy about their expansion plans, you name it. It may even mean real cutbacks in your business as a result of what’s happening in your key markets.

What happens all too often, though, is that marketing efforts are the first area sent to the chopping block. This can be a colossal mistake.

If your goal is to stand out in a crowded marketplace, it is much easier to be heard when your competition is scaling back on marketing and promotion. If your goal is to grow your business, how can this happen if you’re not out there where potential clients and consumers can see you?

Yet in tough times, we do need to be smarter than ever about our expenditures. We need to be judicious about where those dollars go. Here are three smart (and simple) ways to focus your marketing efforts without breaking the bank:

1. Evaluate your current plan and message.
What’s there? Can you trim out fat without losing the essence of what works? Are you being consistent in your message? Do you need to retool how you’re speaking to your market so that they know you can meet their needs in changing times?

2. Think promotion versus advertising.
Advertising isn’t cheap. And in difficult times, it can be hard to justify the same budget for it that you can when business is booming. Review which placements are bringing in business and let the nonperformers go. Then take a close look at high-value promotional tools.

Can you leverage lower cost options such as email, public relations and media outreach and your web site? How can you employ high-value client/consumer education tools such as white papers and case studies? While these latter tools have a higher upfront development cost, they also have a much longer shelf life and a wide variety of uses. And because they offer real value, they’re often not viewed by their intended audiences as marketing.

3. Consider outsourcing.
If you don’t have the capacity to carry out promotional efforts because your staff is putting out fires, developing new business or you just can’t afford to bring someone on, consider per-project outsourcing options. Often, this route can be cheaper, faster and more effective than trying to add to the plate of an already overtaxed staff.

How can your business avoid the knee-jerk "cut" reaction and instead invest in the future? 

Brands, messages, core values. We marketing types often get accused of throwing around buzzwords like these. We like them. We coin new ones all the time. And often, we expect our clients or those non-marketing folks in our offices to know what the heck we're talking about. But the reality is, you can throw away the fancy terms and focus on one thing that is simple to understand. And that one thing will help your business.

Guaranteed.

That thing is called a key message. And it's what separates "marketing" from "communicating."

What the heck is a "key message," anyway?

Simply put, your key message is the one thing that you want your prospects, clients and customers to know about your business in any particular context. It’s why you are communicating with them in the first place. Now, there may be plenty of things that you want to convey in any given situation, but there is always one key message that overrides all of it. Get to that and your marketing conversation becomes much easier and more effective.

Key messages are also situational. While they should never run too far afield of your overall company message, they are driven by audience and by context. What you most want to communicate when issuing a news announcement is not always the same as what you most want to communicate when developing a new market sector brochure. But those messages must smoothly fit together.

The next time you're writing a new communications to your prospects and clients, step back from the branding buzzwords. Ask yourself one question: what do we most want people to know about this service, offer, news?

Just finished up my contribution to CreateAThon 2008, an event that my good friends over at smith&jones in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, look forward to every year. It's a 24-hour marathon of creative work for deserving not-for-profits, fueled by caffeine, food, cameraderie, talent and a community spirit.

As most folks know, I have a soft spot for not-for-profit marketing. After all, I lived it for several years. I've experienced firsthand the mantra of so much to do and so little resources. So participating in the CreateAThon was a no-brainer. (It's also why I offer special not-for-profit project rates for qualified organizations and why I take on a pro-bono charity project every year myself. Interested? Let me know.)

Now that my piece-- brochure copy for a Southern Massachusetts land trust-- has been completed, I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep, but I'll be thinking of my friends pulling an all-nighter. I'm looking forward to seeing all of the great work produced this year!

I was interested this week to participate in a B-2-B webinar with David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of PR & Marketing. And, as usual, David said something interesting.

This time, it was the idea that an e-book is essentially a glorified white paper. 

Recently, I worked on a series of white papers for a client. After they were finished, the client gussied them up with some eye-catching designs, essentially turning them into high quality printed mini-books, rather than the usual bland black-and-white format that gives the white paper its name. The electronic version of this is, as David points out, basically an e-book.

E-books, in my experience, come in different flavors. 

There are the alternative to hardcover versions that will teach you anything from how to write a wedding toast to how to write a killer business plan. Inexplicably, these often contain less content, go through less vetting and yet cost more than a book from your local bookseller. (There are some excellent ones out there as well. And I recently edited one of those.)

Then there are the free, designed-to-be viral e-books that are basically informational tools used to raise visibility for one’s products or services. These are designed to establish expertise and credibility, to build a brand. These are the credentials that members of the media often find online when looking for information about a certain topic. (That's when they call you.)

These are the ones that look something like fancier (and sometimes more meaty) white papers. And they are here to stay.

You see, the new rule is not just that publishing and publicity are now potentially in our hands in a way they never have been before. The rule is also that information publishing and Internet marketing have lost their niche status. Marketing and visibility methods long seen as a wild new frontier are increasingly just the way we do business in the marketing and PR world. 

How are you using these tools-- and new rules-- to your advantage?

Have you ever bought something because of a mission statement?

Recently, an older post on The Essential Message blog caught my attention. In it, Michel Neray points out that no one has ever bought anything because of a mission statement. And as someone who has massaged and crafted mission statements, messages and taglines (and who has sat through more visioning meetings than I care to remember), I relate to what he's saying.

So many of these statements are bloated, meaningless and filled with the words we think our customers want to hear. Or the words that our consultants tell us we must use. You've probably heard these: "You have to think boldly. Big picture. Find the words that capture what we are all about as an organization." Usually, there are all sorts of fun exercises to move the process along.

And yes, some of that is valuable advice. I'm also a big fan of creative exercises. Anything that gets your brain firing from a slightly different direction is going to serve you.

But it's all so internally focused. Do our clients and customers really care if we are thinking big? If we have captured what makes our company tick in a few words that sound pretty good together? Do they care that all 12 people around the table finally found the statement they could all live with?

I think we all know the answers.

The thing is, I actually have bought products and services because of a mission statement. And because of a tagline. My favorite example is Kashi brand cereals. I became a fan of Kashi after being intrigued by these six little words: Seven whole grains on a mission.

What's the mission? To provide me with healthy and tasty snacks and breakfasts. How's that going to happen? By combining seven whole grains together in my cereal. That's really all I needed to know to make the purchase. It know why they're different and what that's going to do for me. And it's repeated often enough that it sticks in my head.

So maybe you're not a cereal fan. And maybe you don't even like that tagline. But sometimes, it really can be that simple.

For example, the company who tells me that their mission is to make me more successful is going to get my attention.

I used to work for a firm that used this not very original yet effective mission statement. And you know what? They grew quickly because that was a very clear message that resonated with the company leaders who purchased their services and products. It was direct, simple and results-oriented.

Too often, we get lost in being clever or in using the words we think people want to hear. We think we need to sound more formal. We think we need to follow formulas. We think we need to "make it sound good". We think we need to be different.

We think everyone from the receptionist to the board needs to love these words...and we leave the people who buy from us in the dust.

Whether it's your tagline or a new web site or the business development materials you pass on to prospects, the question is the same: are you actually talking to your audience? Or is this just an internal exercise?