Yesterday I was speaking to a client that
had just returned from a long business trip where, he said, he had spent a
small fortune on entertaining clients, amongst other things, and the end result
was one very nice new piece of business and a handful of potential projects. The
total cost, he said, was far out-weighed by the value of the one confirmed
piece of business, and if some of the other projects came off then the whole
trip could be regarded as a huge success. “Ah ha,” I said, “that is exactly what I keep
banging on about – if you get back more than you spend on any marketing
activity, then where is the downside?!”
As an agency, we have had numerous
discussions with clients over the past few years who want to cut back or stop
any form of marketing – even the biggest companies in the world have reduced
their advertising and PR budgets significantly.
But every time we have this discussion (and trust me, I know how
difficult it is to spend money when you don’t really have any…!), I ask them
how they plan to build their businesses back to where they were before the
economic crisis if they don’t do any form of marketing activity – which they
are not usually able to answer.
At this point, I should mention a quote
that I saw one time by the CEO of one of the big FMCG goods companies a few
years ago, who said “I love a recession – I can guarantee that all of our
competitors will stop their marketing, whilst we will be increasing ours. And the result of that will be that we will
not only maintain the business that we already have, but take over a lot of
theirs as well”… Or words to that
effect.
Of course it is easy to say that when you
are running a huge empire with a large amount of money in the bank! But if you are trying to keep costs as low
as possible, and you have no real budget available, it is very difficult to
take a risk and spend what you don’t have on something that is not guaranteed
to work. But then… if you don’t do
anything, and your competitors start to increase their own marketing activity,
you might end up with no business at all.
So what to do?
I have talked before about the various marketing
activities that you can do without spending very much – and maybe some of you
have tried a few of these ideas and have seen a bit of improvement. But, generally, to get really significant
results, you have to spend more than just a few crowns.
What we are seeing now is that there are
companies that are prepared to invest into marketing, so now we are busy persuading
those companies that they should not give this budget to their tea lady or
junior assistant to use – if that is where you are now, please treat this
budget as you would your accounting, legal affairs, building work or any other
professional service, and use someone that is trained and has experience in
marketing. Otherwise you, too, will join the ranks of those that think that
marketing doesn’t work.
Finding that person is not always that
easy, so in the next blog I will discuss the differences between in-house and
external marketing people, and what you can expect.
More then!
