How to Market in Hard Times

Luke McKeever, CEO of Portrait Software, reveals why optimization and customer centricity are key to marketing in a tough climate.

“In today's highly competitive marketplace where customers are bombarded by marketing across all channels, knowing when, where and what to communicate becomes the differentiating factor”
-Luke McKeever, CEO, Portrait Software

Your marketing budget has just been cut, sales are down and the market is as competitive as you have ever known – so what do you do? Throttle back, tighten your belt, make do with what you have and weather the storm. Or see this as an opportunity to take advantage. As your competition eases up on the pedal you have an opportunity to get ahead. Not by spending more but by marketing smarter.

Henry Ford once said, “Business is like an automobile. It won’t run itself, except downhill.” So with a slight change of vehicle analogies, cut the engines on your marketing and you may be gliding – but don’t count on any thermals to bring you back up. The outcome is inevitable and it takes more power to get back up to your previous height, let alone go higher than before.

A McGraw-Hill Research study showed that four years after a downturn, companies that maintained or increased marketing during the economic slowdown typically experienced 14 times more growth than those that cut back. Companies that gain share during downturns historically keep that increased share when the economy bounces back.

History says keep marketing but practice smarter marketing. Smarter marketing is about optimization and for marketers optimization comes in two flavors. The first is centred on the efficiency of marketing production, which relates to the creation, procurement and delivery of all marketing goods and services. The second focuses on the effectiveness of the marketing activity, which relates to how well the activity influences the customer and their propensity to respond to your offer, either directly or indirectly as a result of the activity. Here we focus on the latter and how to continue to your CRM journey and continually enhance and optimize communications with your customer base and prospective target markets.

The key here is alignment with key business goals. For some organizations the priority may still be increasing market share, however over the past 12 months we have seen a major shift in the business priorities for customers facing organisations. Growth strategies are giving way to retention strategies as organizations look to conserve and grow the value of the customer base they have rather than focus on expansion. However acquisition tactics cannot just be re-targeted on customers.  What treatment strategy should be adopted for which customer? Are they at risk of defection or do they show a high propensity to acquire further product or should they be left alone? How about customers you have lost – should you target these customers for win back?

What is clear is that you need a clear ‘portrait’ of each and every customer to optimize the message. In today’s highly competitive marketplace where customers are bombarded by marketing across all channels, knowing when, where and what to communicate becomes the differentiating factor. Today the beating heart of any customer centric strategy is intelligence, the more you know the better you can serve, retain and grow that customer. Great customer advocates then become a key tenant of your relationship strategy. The right of passage is to serve well through consistent processes, use these interactions to learn and build intelligence, use this intelligence to plot your customer in the maturity lifecycle and hence drive automated customer engagement and ensure every customer interaction counts. In today’s market less is more. Smart companies are spending more time listening to and learning from their customers rather than broadcasting, and then at the right moment choosing to interact with that customer at the opportune time. Spend less on communication but achieve a higher return – it’s true.

The good news is that smart companies are taking advantage of this opportunity to get a head start over the competition by moving forward with their incremental CRM solutions based on smarter marketing. Think customer, think analytics, and automate engagement to retain, increase customer value and win back lost customers.