Happy New Year!

Labor Day is behind us and the National Football League begins this week. Must be fall coming, so why “Happy New Year”? If you’re like me, September, back-to-school time, and even the NFL seems like a fresh start. Yes, January is the start of the year, but after 16 years of schooling and now with school-age kids, this time of year is the “new year”.

I seem to sense people feeling that in business as well. Although economic indicators continue to be troubling, I find a fresh perspective in many of the business people with whom I’ve been meeting. To that end – what should your organization be considering regarding marketing at this “new” time of year?

If you’re like a lot of organizations, 2009 has meant a lot of changes to budgets to support marketing tactics and probably the measurable results of those tactics. This is a great time to reconsider your strategies and tactics and develop a plan that will prime you for 2010 and beyond.

So what to be thinking about? If I were working with you and your company, I’d make sure we discussed these things:

Assessing Our Tactics – A couple weeks back, I wrote a post about “The New Normal” describing the possibility that the economic shifts of the last year have fundamentally re-set the way business decisions are made; i.e. how businesses of all sizes look at cash, credit and purchases.

• How are our strategies and tactics stacking up against this new reality?
• How much marketing do we need to do?
• What types of tactics will work?
• How do Social Media Marketing and other new interactive techniques fit in?
• What message and call-to-action will work in this new normal?

Tracking Our Process – The process is key for making our marketing tactics (direct mail, online, telephone, etc.) as effective as possible.

• Do we know how sales are really made?
• How do suspects turn into prospects and prospects turn into customers?
• How do our marketing and sales fit together?
• Are there gaps letting potential sales slip through?
• Are there dams that are causing prospects to leave the pipeline?
• How do new tactics we try get tested and integrated into the process?

Finding New Opportunities – With any change, new opportunities arise. In a downturn, market share (gaining a larger share of the available business) is almost always up for grabs. Conditions in the marketplace can also create opportunities for selling more to current customers.

• What opportunities exist with our current customers?
• What do our best customers look like and how can we find more like them?
• Am I missing part of the profile for new prospects because I really don’t understand the reasons customers buy?
• Can we create loyalty and more sales with some new offers to existing customers? Or packaging our products/services differently to meet a new/changing need?
• Can we create new target segments?

Sure, there are more than these three that could bring benefit, in fact it was tough to get this list down to three! However, embodied in these three items is the way to get control of your marketing and make it as effective as possible as quickly as possible.

If you want to hear some of the other ideas that were close but didn’t make the list, email me (genius at geniusmarketing.com). Also send me a note if you’d like to discuss how to get these things done, I’d love to talk to you further.

SLE