Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published  January 17, 2009 on the Tatum Marketing blog

Earlier this week I saw a report from Computer Economics (IT Spending Forecast for 2009-2010) predicting that spending on IT equipment and software will recover faster from this recession than it did after the 2000 technology meltdown. Furthermore, the recovery will begin in early 2010.

This started me thinking. What should marketers and business owners be doing now to prepare for next year’s recovery?

Here’s my list.

1. Use the IT spending report as an excuse to talk to your customers and prospects, and ask about their plans.

When do they see recovery coming? If recovery is going to begin in 2010, does that mean the actual buying will begin or that the buying process will begin? This information will let you know how much time you really have before you’d better have your act together.

2. Clean up your lists and database(s).

Chances are good that right now you’re not worrying about an aggressive attack from one of your competitors. Maybe you should be, but that’s a different story.

Right now you’ve got a little breathing room to do some housekeeping. Prospect lists and marketing / sales databases are notoriously hard to keep clean. (Mainly because it’s boring). But a dirty list or database makes you inefficient at best and ineffective or annoying to your prospects and customers at worst.

So, clean them up. Update contact info. Get rid of the dead ones. Combine various lists (newsletter subscribers, people who downloaded a whitepaper, webinar or trade show attendees) and put them in a single place.

And by the way, people tend to come and go (mostly go) during a recession, so it’s especially important to know who contact when things heat up again.

3. Fix your website.

Eric Gerds recently wrote a great article on Conducting a Website Review. Follow his advice to get rid of old and outdated content, find and fix broken links, and add new content to keep visitors coming back to your site.

More than that, you should take a look at how well your website is contributing to your overall business effort. Is it attracting and keeping the right prospects? The numbers may be lower than in better years, but the quality of the visitor should still be there. Are they spending enough time and visiting the right pages? Are you converting them to contacts?

Now could be a really good time to take a look at your website strategy.

4. Maintain your visibility.

Stay in touch with your clients and active prospects. When they’re ready to buy again you don’t want to be wasting time reminding them of who you are.

Choose your contact style to match whomever you’re trying to reach. At Tatum Marketing, we find some clients prefer email and others like a quick phone call. It pays to know which is which, and use that method for contacting them. (I don’t personally know anyone who prefers a letter these days but you might.)

Prospects may be less likely to take your phone call and email tends to work better for them.

No matter how you contact them, keep your communication relevant and helpful. Most people are overworked, uncomfortable and a little anxious. Anything you can do to help make their jobs easier or spark new ideas will be welcome.

5. Review and overhaul your marketing process.

Most marketing processes are rife with holes – especially where marketing meets sales. If you’re well positioned when the economy picks up, it’ll be too late to find and fill the holes. You’ll be scrambling to turn visitors into leads and leads into customers with a faulty system.

This is a topic I’ll address in more detail in a future article, but here’s a list of places that could likely use a tune-up.

• Target audience. As businesses have evolved to meet new demands and ways of doing business, your ideal prospect may have changed.
• Prospect profiling and ranking. Not all prospects are alike. They’re in different stages of the buying process; they have different needs according to their positions; and some are just plain better than others. Companies that excel at marketing know this and account for it.
• Hand-off to sales. The surest way to kill a perfectly good prospect is to hand it off to sales too early – and with no method for returning prospects to marketing when appropriate.
• Lead development system. 80% or more of the people who show interest in your product or service won’t be ready to buy immediately. Suffice it to say you need a really good program for nurturing these prospects until they’re ready to talk to a sales person.

I hope you’re maintaining some level of visibility and customer / prospect contact even in these tough times. The more visibility and contact, the better. We know from the past that along with recessions come real opportunities to gain market share now or early in the recovery.

Be ready.