Blogging in 2011 comes to a standstill

Happy New Year!

As pointed out in a previous post, blogging in a consistent and timely manner is a lot of work.

Which brings us to this post. I won’t be blogging in 2011 because I’m taking on a university course that will require a big committment. This on top of a really full plate of work, means something has to give, and it’s gonna have to be the blog.  You know how it is. Paying clients and homework (investment in tuition) come first. Alas, blogging is a ‘nice to do’ rather than a ‘must do’ in my consulting business. So it goes.

Thank you for all the emailed comments and suggestions for blogging topics. 2011 will be a really interesting year, both professionally and academically. Therefore, the 2012 blog should reflect those new experiences and knowledge.

Getting Good Value from PR

Sometimes the same question comes up from several sources, which makes you wonder if there is something in the air or if it’s phases of the moon. This time, the question was PR. More specifically, how can a small company get good value from PR?

You could refer to the now-famous Proctor and Gamble study which measured the effectiveness of a mix of marketing activities and found that PR delivered the highest ROI and drove as much sales volume as their advertising, and for a whole lot less. Plus, it had spillover benefits to other areas of marketing, advertising, and sales. That’s a greatly simplified summary, so you should read the article.

First of all, ask yourself – why am I doing PR? Is the goal to gain more industry visibility? Are you planning an IPO or trying to find a buyer? Do you want to promote your CTO as a thought leader? Plan out your PR activities (and other supporting marketing activities) accordingly; and that means not just the activities, but a review of your messaging and positioning statements. In fact, do you know your target audience’s opinion of you now? Perhaps you need to do a little reality check first, before you spend money persuading them to change their minds about … what? What do they think of your product?

Do you try PR yourself or hire an agency or consultant?

Don’t try doing PR yourself unless you already have the experience, skills, and time. Please.

I’ve had good success putting agencies/consultants on a fixed retainer and working with them to target specific publications and influential analysts. In a perfect world, you find a PR professional who knows the etiquette, the who’s who, and already have relationships with editors and analysts in your target space. Less perfect is the agency who gets up to speed at your cost. You can’t always find a perfect match, so in those cases, I’ll go with a referral to someone who is good, can get up to speed fast and do a creditable job while learning about your market space.

Unless you’ve just polluted the Gulf Coast, PR efforts are more effective than advertising because readers know the information is being presented by an impartial journalist, industry analyst or blogger. The more influential and credible the journalist, the more weight it carries. At the same time, you need to craft your message and information carefully because you have absolutely no control over what will be written. So with that in mind, remember that it’s all about building good relationships with the media, because not only will that get you more ink, you may be able to improve the tone of the article that gets written. Whether you’ve hired a PR professional or will be handling PR yourself, it never hurts to remember a few good practices:

Make sure you have real news. It’s not about you, it’s about what the publication’s readership will find interesting. Otherwise you’re just wasting the journalist’s time. The fact that you’ve moved from one location to another isn’t news, the fact that you’re moving because you’ve just bought another company for its technology and need to consolidate offices is more newsworthy. Too many no-news phone calls or emails to your contact, and you’ve lost any chance of building a relationship. It’s the same for any company big or small – it has to be news worth reading. Sometimes you can spin the story to tie in to a bigger issue in the marketplace, to lend more weight to the information.

Be easy to work with. Journalists are under real stress these days. Publications are folding up at an unbelieveable rate, losing ad revenues, and laying off staff. Fewer editors/reporters trying to cover the same topics means you need to be high value and professional. Be on time for phone calls, get all your background information together, have information ready to email before or just after your interview, make sure your top business or technical manager is available and waiting for a call with the journalist, provide a media kit online with artwork they can use … the list goes on, but you get the idea.

Make sure your spokespersons are trained to deal with the media. There is no such thing as “off the record”. Need I say more?

Provide content. Write your own stories and offer them up to selected journalists. Case studies. They love customer case studies. Include quotes from your customer. Let the journalist have the byline for the story.

Back to the understaffed world of publications – not only are print versions dying, publications now have to provide free content online in order to compete and maintain visibility. And here you have an opportunity, because how do online publications get extra content and build a reader community? By getting content from their readers. You can submit comments, articles, link to your blog. Be thoughtful, helpful, avoid badmouthing the competition, take the high road. Establish a credible presence on the site and the editor will love you, depend on you, call you when they need a quote or information.

And finally, the mantra. In marketing, as in life, there are no silver bullets. You need to execute a number of different initiatives, and the accumulative effect is what will make a difference. If Proctor and Gamble relied on PR alone, that in itself would not have delivered a high ROI. One article in Widget News won’t send sales soaring. A consistent PR program feeding out a steady diet of stories about customer successes and innovations, speaking engagements at key industry events, and other activities that drive up visibility in combination with other marketing activities will increase the effectiveness of your PR activities and vice versa.

Small Website Challenges

When times are bad, companies will often look for new revenue sources by expanding out to different markets. For businesses that offer expertise, such as website development or IT administration, this could mean offering a different type of expertise that is complementary to what they already have, or going after a different target audience with the same offerings. For example, a team that normally builds websites for medium-sized companies may tweak their sales and marketing to attract smaller clients — single-owner businesses.

Sounds like a reasonable move – every business needs a website these days. If you have the skills and tools to build a complex e-commerce site, how difficult can it be to build a simple website-plus-shopping cart for a single-owner business? Think of all the small home-based businesses out there without websites. Think of all the low-end shopping cart software that costs less than $300, all customizable. This could be fertile ground.

It’s just an exercise in scaling down your project management and technology, right?

Trouble is, unless the business owner is conversant with websites from both the business and technical aspects, you will need to provide a lot of education and guidance. You won’t have an RFP to help you scope the project or to understand the business and its online needs. You will need to learn about the quirks of their business and whether your preferred shopping cart software can handle them. All this before you (yes, you, not the client) can come up with a realistic set of requirements. Not to mention doing it all on a budget that will allow you to deliver something you’d be happy to list on your portfolio. Nope, it’s not about scaling technology, it’s an exercise in front-loading the project with consulting and support services. Because chances are while the customer knows everything there is to know about aromatherapy, fitness training, fine foods or vintage records, he knows nothing about building websites.

So, assuming you’ve decided to go trolling for web development business with small, single-owner businesses, here are some observations:

Offer professional content development as one of your services. This is a useful way to help both you and the client determine the information categories for the website. It helps to move the project along because you won’t be waiting for the client to deliver content. It ensures quality content – no matter how beautiful your design and intuitive the navigation, bad writing sabotages the effectiveness of the site.

For business owners who are not IT professionals, it can be difficult just organizing their ideas. I spent an interesting evening with a couple of very successful consultants from the healthcare industry. They are highly experienced users of Microsoft Office, Project, and Visio — not afraid of using technology. But when it came to structuring information for a professional website, they were overwhelmed. We went through an exercise of categorizing the type of information they wanted to present, which pages would have links to other pages, how much detail to provide, the fact that they could build two different pages to target two types of clients (corporations and individuals), and privacy issues.

Be sure you understand the customer’s online requirements in detail. There is some pretty good shopping cart software available for $300 or less. Most will handle 90% of online product ordering quirks. But every time you have to customize or change code, this extra work costs hard dollars. The problem is the customer is not experienced enough to warn you up front about the quirks. You really, really need to determine requirements in more detail than for web-literate customers.

As an example, I know a team of very smart, customer-focused web developers who took on a project for the owner of a cheque printing business. He wanted a shopping cart for ordering cheques online. I doubt they made money on this project because although there were only three types of cheques (manual, laser, continuous forms), there were a lot of options. It wasn’t like ordering a sweater in S, M, L and blue or pink. There were multiple colour and background options. Customers could order cheques in specified amounts of 200 – 5000. Customers also could attach a company logo to be printed on the cheque. Then there was the numbering on the cheques, not to mention the company’s and bank’s name.

In this situation, they were able to use workarounds and a few bits of custom programming to meet the requirements. But it all added up to more work than they had counted on; some of the tweaks they did partway through the project would have been easier to handle had they realized the issues earlier. Given the requirements, perhaps a different shopping cart would have been a better choice.

Use meaningful placeholder text in pages when you are showing work-in-progress. Rather than leave a page blank, populate it with text that indicates what should be on the page once it’s complete. “Your shipping terms and conditions go here”. Or the client will freak. Do not expect the customer to be able to visualize or understand how close you really are to being finished, or how trivial it is to add missing functionality. The more sample content you provide, the better. In general, I’d say that account management goes more smoothly if you are able to populate the work-in-progress in a way that helps the customer visualize the finished result. Remember that suggestion about a professional content developer.

Really know your system capabilities. When you have a low budget website, the temptation is to use lower-cost components, such as a cheaper shopping cart. Which you may not know as well as the one you normally use. Which could trip you up. In that online cheque store example, the shopping cart took all those colour, quantity, and address fields on a cheque order and turned them into one long text string description that looked terrible on the invoice – and in other places. This is not an issue if you know about this in advance and can (a) discuss with the customer how to format the invoice and (b) build some custom programming into the price.

Build some packaged services. Package A: website with a blog and no e-commerce. Package B: website with blog, shopping cart of up to 10 products with 5 order options each. Package C: website with blog, shopping cart, and up to 5 plug-ins for social networking. You get the idea. This is a low-budget customer, but if you put some parameters around the deliverables and build some templates to reduce actual development effort, you can still turn a profit.

Good documentation reduces support costs (and customer frustration). The “let them use Wordpress” approach just won’t work here when it comes to ongoing content management. If you are serious about building websites for small businesses, it’s worth investing in some “how to” document templates that the project team (and content developer) can fill in along the way. The customer might pay for your time to manage and edit the website, but if not, hand over a manual that shows exactly where every page, every product photo, product description, every price code lives. Also where every line of text that shows up on the screen, an invoice, or an automated email lives — and how to change or delete it. Hopefully, this will be a cut & paste exercise that is repeatable for each customer.

Repeatable really is the key to structuring low-budget projects. Low budget means you need to turn over a lot of these projects to equal the revenues of a large project. The more you can package up your services and delivery method, the lower your cost per project and the faster you can move on to the next. The most challenging part of working with a single-owner business is working with the client at a consultative level to determine requirements. This is also where you can really impress the customer with your willingness to learn about their business, helpful approach, and proactive ideas.

This is what you want because with this type of customer, word-of-mouth referral is your best advertising.

Taking the Summer Off

Taking time off from blogging in June, July and August.

Back in September!

Social Media and Your Marketing Plan

A new client has asked me about the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool. Should they blog, or tweet, or Facebook? What delivers the best bang for the bucks?

First of all, a pet peeve. It’s still about reaching your target audience. It really bothers me to read articles that rave about social media for marketing, written in a way that makes me think the author is 25 years old and truly believes that everyone texts or tweets. I have a client who sells to a demographic dominated by male managers of near-retirement age, guys who prefer to print out their emails. Social media would be irrelevant to this target audience. However, this also means that in five or six years, a younger generation of managers will step into those shoes, and there may be good reason for this client to review their online marketing strategy.

Here’s my personal take on what works, and in order of effectiveness:

Customer Reviews – a ton of studies from sites such as Bazaarvoice have shown that when customers read positive recommendations about a product or company, their trust level goes up, conversion rates go up, value of each purchase goes up. So add a feedback mechanism to your website, and make sure your product or service lives up to its billing. If you receive a nice note from a customer, ask permission to quote. Challenge: collecting a good sample of reviews and keeping current. Dealing with negative comments.

Question and Answer tools – this doesn’t get rid of the old FAQ page, but Q&A tools allow for interactive feedback from your customer community. When questions get answered by another user, the customer gives it more credence. Challenge: unless your company has a large and active user community, it could take a while for questions to get answered and answers could be inaccurate, depending on the knowledge level of the person replying. You may need to moderate and reply in a timely manner. If so, always identify yourself as a company employee.

Twitter – this is the 21st century version of word of mouth, and word of mouth is still the consumer’s number one choice when it comes to trusted information sources. Challenge: not to be approached lightly. Many are the tales of companies who made one bad tweet, and caused their reputation to plummet. There is more to Twitter than just monitoring tweets and contributing to discussions. This needs a  plan, consistent messaging, and some dedicated resource to monitor the discussion.

Facebook – many companies have launched Facebook pages. The most successful have managed to create a community of “fans” around their products and keep things lively. Challenge: if you’re just starting out, you have to work to build up your fan base. As with Twitter, needs a marketing plan, consistent messaging, and some dedicated resource to monitor the discussion.

Blogging – the best blogs provide information or entertainment (think new product news, views, jokes) and do so on a regular and consistent basis. If your blog allows comments, it’s a good way to interact with customers. Done right, blogs can attract links, enhance your brand, and position you as an expert in your industry. Challenge: as with Twitter and Facebook, a company/retail blog needs to be launched with a marketing plan that defines goals, frequency of update, an editorial calendar or similar concept; and also you will need someone who is churning out content. It’s a lot of work because nothing looks sadder than an out-of-date blog – looks like you’ve given up on the business.

It’s no coincidence I seem to have ranked these with a lot of consideration for the amount of work involved. Customer Reviews are at the top. This is the most forgiving tactic for small companies. You can gradually build up your collection of customer comments, publish them when you can. Go lower down the list, and the workload increases. You need to dedicate resources and respond in real time – really make the commitment.

I take a serious approach towards social media as marketing tools. They seem so light hearted and spontaneous at first glance, but in practice they need a lot of nurturing, monitoring, and fresh content if they are to contribute effectively to your overall marketing plan. That is still the main goal of any marketing professional: to execute on a marketing plan that reaches the right target audience. In this context, social media would be just one element of an integrated marketing plan, which could include traditional print, trade show attendance, news releases, or contributed articles to consumer or trade publications.

Brand Value and the Exit Strategy

A client recently experienced the value of brand marketing – the kind that makes a small business appear larger or more influential than its size would normally warrant.

When we first took his company to market several years ago, he had just bought the business. For long-term planning purposes, I asked him about his exit strategy, and he replied that there were two options: build up the business to a point where revenues from a large installed base allowed him to cruise into retirement, or to sell the business one day.

In order to maximize resale value, it was key for the company to build brand awareness – superior technology doesn’t promote itself, I don’t care what engineers say. As a new player, another challenge was credibility. Plus, the company had a small marketing budget. When you run into this situation, the client has to be willing to commit a fixed budget every year so that even if the marketing campaign is low-key, it’s consistent every year. When there are good years, you can bump up the marketing activities, but the baseline remains consistent.

We allocated the major part of the company’s marketing budget to placing ads in the premier publication for his industry. Not full page ads, and not in every issue, but decent size ads running in every other issue to create a consistent, credible presence and to get across the key messages.

Nothing gets a message across as well as quotes from happy customers, so we also ran a case study campaign, pitching ideas for contributed articles to the editor of the publication and building a relationship so that we could have some influence on the timing of the stories; the goal was to have the contributed articles run in issues where the ads didn’t. We didn’t make this happen in every issue, but on the whole, the strategy was successful, nearly every issue contained something about the company, and the market noticed.

Over the next few years, the company got tangible proof these activities were making a difference: from the number of enquiries through the company’s website to the number of attendees at trade shows who came to see the product. The client came back from one show and told me, with a big grin, that one of the major players had been heard to ask “Who ARE these guys?”

Now a competitor has approached them about buying the company. The client is convinced that a consistent approach to marketing has helped establish brand value, making the company a valuable target for acquisition.  Love it when good things happen to good clients.

Haitian Creole Translation in a Hurry

This is a very brief post, what a crazy busy month. But I have to write about this.

One of the highlights of the month for me was writing a feature story for the Microsoft Research website about the amazing work their Natural Language Processing (NLP) group did for the aid effort in Haiti.

Ever wonder how disaster relief workers communicate with victims who speak a different language? How many translators can they make available to the various humanitarian agencies?

It turns out that between translation technology and cellular broadband wireless coverage, some of the aid workers can get access to smart phone apps and translation web sites. Web sites such as CrisisCommons have volunteers who leverage technology to support aid efforts, and some have built mobile applications that make use of translation tools or websites.

However, Haitian Creole is not on the list of major languages supported by the online translation services. When a Microsoft employee who was involved in the aid effort approached the NLP about solving this problem, the research group pulled together a Haitian Creole translation system in five, you heard me, five days.

Translator Fast-Tracks Haitian Creole

Why post this on a blog? Because the research group hopes that the word gets out so that more people make use of the system — and that includes developers who build applications that benefit the aid effort. See the “What You Can Do to Help” section at the end of the article, and pass it on.

Study of a Case Study

It’s always a pleasure to work with bright, motivated young marketing professionals. The only thing they are missing is experience, and sometimes this leads to poor planning and missed deadlines when they discover yet another situation where the classroom fails to reflect real life. Given recent discussions with some colleagues and clients, I am starting to think that this blog should be about sharing those hard-learned lessons that experience can teach you. So this blog entry is about working on case studies.  

When a company wants a really effective sales tool, there are not many kinds of collateral that deliver as much impact as a well-written case study. A case study contains so many positive elements: it’s a customer testimonial; it helps prospects relate to a real-life situation; it can be used as content for a website; it can be content for a company or customer newsletter; it can be pitched to publications as a feature article. If published, the magazine reprints make an even stronger selling piece, since it implies editorial approval.

Despite the high value of case studies, there have been very few times in my career where a case study assignment has been a smooth, uninterrupted process. Why is it so difficult to actually write a case study? Because the stars that need to be in alignment are mostly outside your control. So before you hire a writer to work on “a bunch of case studies”, only to have this resource sitting and waiting for the go-ahead, here is the project workflow. In an ideal world, of course.

Communicate your plan to Sales. Salespeople are always eager to promote their successes. Have them nominate customers who would make good case study candidates. Unless Marketing has a direct relationship with the customer contact, ask Sales to sell the case study idea to the customer and provide you with an introduction to the contact who will work with you on the story. You want to avoid situations where you build plans around a customer who turns out to be ‘not ready’.

Confirm that the customer’s company policy allows case studies. Companies are more wary than ever of talking about their operations or recommending vendors in public. If their industry or company is under scrutiny, PR activities come to a standstill (except for damage control) and only the highest priority activities get any attention. Helping to promote a vendor does not come under the list of priorities, even at the best of times. But if the company is open to a case study, find out what the parameters are. Sometimes there are no guidelines, it’s a “let’s see what you come up with” situation, and the story goes to their Marketing and Legal departments for review on a case by case basis.

Communicate your plans to the Customer. It’s good to prepare briefing notes for your customer contact, to make his/her job easier if the idea needs to be sold to the customer’s organization. Include the general intent of the story – the classic is to describe a challenge, the solution requirements, the solution deliverables and implementation, the happy situation afterwards. Include how the story will be used: in a data sheet, on the website, as a contributed article to a certain publication.

Build in lead time for customer reviews. You may have pre-sold the story idea to a publication, and your friendly editor is on deadline and waiting for your story. Legal and Marketing approval from a customer can take longer than writing the story, and you want the friendly editor to stay friendly, so avoid making deadline promises you can’t keep.

Project manage the process. Your writer has to develop the case study with help from various subject matter experts (SME). The salesperson provides some background on the before and after, Marketing provides messaging and the benefits to highlight, the systems engineer outlines the implementation challenges, the customer contact provides their view of how your product has vastly improved productivity and delivered on cost savings. The customer is only one SME; the others are from your own organization and probably very busy. You need to help make the connections happen. Then, once the story goes to the customer for review, you or someone with job title clout needs to track the review and approval process. Nudge things along in a professional, courteous way.

Follow up and get more case studies. I can pretty much guarantee that if you started out with a list of ten case study candidates, that even if you do everything right, a few will opt out along the way. Or get too busy to work with you. No problem. Maintain a list of case study candidates, both new customers and the existing ones who opt out. Follow up to find out if their situation has changed. The goal is to have an ongoing case study program so you can freshen up your website and collaterals with new stories. Ping Sales regularly to find out if they have any customers who would make good case studies.

When to work on case studies. I recommend initiating a case study with the customer shortly after your solution has been installed. The project will still be top-of-mind with the customer and you’ll get more attention. Their implementation team will still be there for a few months after it goes live, their impressions will be fresh, and they are going to be as eager as you to promote their success. It’s still honeymoon time. Wait a year and that team or manager may have been transferred to another project and you’ll be speaking to a newcomer who lacks knowledge about the original reasons for bringing in the solution, and who may not be as positive.

Perhaps you are both writer and project manager for some case studies. Well, as you can see, writing the story is the least of your challenges.

Be Thankful for Your Bad Year

It’s U.S. Thanksgiving and the holiday season is coming up. So speaking of Thanksgiving I wanted to take a break from project-talk. It’s been a bad year for everyone, but when we say “bad”, many of us mean no European vacation, fewer dinners out, and no more impulse purchases.

For those struggling in war-torn and impoverished countries, a “good” day means being able to fill a bucket with clean water or sending a child to school.  Over the past two years, a group of friends have been giving donations to charities in lieu of gifts to each other. After all, we have everything we need, and more stuff won’t improve our lives significantly. But a small donation can make the difference between hope and despair for someone in a third-world country.  So before you allocate your Christmas budget, consider these organizations and be truly thankful for your bad year:

Kiva.com: This micro-finance organization uses lending to alleviate poverty.  Kiva works through established local microfinance partners around the world, focusing on low income entrepreneurs. They disburse small loans –ranging from hundreds to a few thousand dollars – that traditional banks are not set up to deal with. For as little as $25 you can pitch in to help a small business. Their website allows you to select the entrepreneur, making this a person-to-person micro-lending arrangement. Once your loan is repaid, you can re-invest in another worthy small business.

Women for Women International:  This organization helps women rebuild their lives after war has taken away their homes, families, community and self-confidence.  They operate in truly desperate locations: Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Kosovo, Nigeria, Rwanda, and the Sudan. During and after conflict, women are the most vulnerable to violence and bear a disproportionate burden of poverty. WWI educates women, typically in a one-year program where women learn an income-earning skill, literacy and about their rights. Donate $27 a month for 12 months to sponsor a woman, and the money goes to supporting her basic needs while she attends classes.

Doctors Without Borders: No political or religious affiliations, just some modern-day heroes going into situations even the Red Cross hesitates to enter. Armed conflict, natural disasters, disease, or famine are all part of their mandate for humanitarian action. Enough said.

Smarter Ways with a Smaller Marketing Budget

For many companies, fall is a time to start looking ahead as their fiscal year comes to a close and planning begins for the next year.  I’m sure everyone is glad to leave behind 2009 but despite encouraging signs from some sectors of the economy, most companies are still very cautious about their prospects for the coming year and want to understand how to get best value for their marketing dollars. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on marketing plans for some clients, and while they have varying budgets and different target audiences, there have been some common responses to smaller marketing budgets.

• Cut out program elements altogether: stop advertising completely or stop attending all shows.
• Do more with less skilled staff: push junior team members to fill the roles that that senior people used to perform.
• Do less of the same: fewer webinars, fewer trade shows, less advertising.

What’s the impact of such decisions? There’s financial expediency and then there is perception.  Who was it that said “Perception is reality”?

Stopping completely. One client has a competitor who has vanished completely from trade shows and magazine print ads. This has generated speculation about the financial viability of that company, an extremely negative perception to contend with, especially in an industry where customers count on long-term supplier relationships.

Doing less of the same would have been a better decision for this competitor.  Tightening the belt is a responsible decision that people can understand, but vanishing from the scene only confirms their worst suspicions and create concerns even for loyal customers. You still need to reach out and convey your message; no communications means you have no way of exercising control over market perceptions. Bump up other means of communication: do more cost-effective online/email promotions, drop some postcards in the mail, submit case studies to those magazines to get some free publicity (and make sure they are well-written).

Using less skilled people. I’ve known start-ups who tried to economize by hiring inexperienced (cheap) programmers, marketing staff, or salespeople.  This is a false economy: think about the ultimate cost of poor code or product being late-to-market; think about untrained salespeople ruining your reputation with customers.

And as for marketing, anyone can spend a lot of money and make it look good, but when you have a severely constrained budget, that is the time you most need experienced, effective marketing professionals; otherwise the risk is a “marketing plan” that is just a list of things-to-do that don’t deliver results – in the end, a waste.  In my opinion, start-ups are the ones that need experienced people the most.  They can’t afford to be training staff on-the-job; they have a critical window in which to deliver results.  Senior marketing professionals are the ones who can analyze results, review goals, and re-tool campaigns to support your business goals. You want people who can draw from a deep well of experience, assess what will and won’t work for your situation, and execute on plans with no fuss. If you are unable to hire, at least bring in an experienced consultant to develop a plan for you. Your junior staff will do a far better job of executing on a good marketing plan with some guidance.

Doing less of the same. Of the three typical responses I’ve dealt with, this would seem to be the best option, but even this merits some re-thinking. When your budget gets cut and even when it doesn’t, it’s always good to review the effectiveness of past activities and consider whether those same campaigns would be effective under current conditions. Get creative with less resources rather than just doing less.

Trade shows are expensive, and often the first to go.  But are there other ways of achieving presence at a particularly important show? Frankly I’ve never thought of booth presence as the reason for attending a show. Your best ROI comes from setting up meetings before the show, and using the event as a convenient place to meet. If your company has a culture of using trade shows as a venue for holding pre-scheduled meetings with customers, prospects, or editors, then you are in a good position to achieve good results without a booth by going ahead and scheduling those meetings as usual before the show; but rather than meet at the booth, meet elsewhere at the show.  I’ve known companies who rented hotel suites and used them very effectively as private meeting rooms. It’s all in the pre-show preparation.

As for print ads, you may want to run them less frequently or go from full-page to half-page.  But don’t just cut back, think of ways to continue maintaining visibility: can you increase the frequency of email newsletters? Create some inexpensive postcard mail outs? Is this a good time to launch some web seminars to educate prospects and nudge them along the sales cycle?

I don’t consider any of these observations to be original or brilliant.  But at times like these when the economy is bad, clients seem to freeze up and forget the lessons of the past.  Consider this blog entry as a gentle reminder that there are always creative ways to maintain visibility and a strong message – even with a reduced budget. Just don’t vanish from the horizon – it could cost you more in the long run.

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