In a constrained market situation where budgets have been slashed across the board, the trick is to look at marketing initiatives that can be created with little or no cost – or, at best, on an incremental cost basis. Read on to know more.

Did you wrongly assume that your company was recession-proof, and are you now wondering how to bounce back? No doubt what is making your job difficult is the fact that budgets have been slashed across the board and marketing expenditure trimmed.

The trick then is to look at marketing initiatives that can be created with little or no cost – or, at best on incremental cost basis, but which still deliver sales traction. That may sound like a Herculean task, but it is actually not that difficult. Here are four ideas to get you started.

#1 Mining customer accounts

Most companies try to acquire new business during a financial lull, believing that any rate of success will keep them afloat. Unfortunately, in most cases this success rate is very low. Companies should instead use this period to invest in their existing customers and analyze these accounts to see how best they can add value.

Say for example, that if an IT company wanted to analyze its customer base to identify opportunities for growth, it could look adopt a framework such as the one below:

• Zero-in on significant growth customers and identify further business opportunities
• Map cross-selling patterns among these significant customers
• Analyze stagnant customers and understand reasons for lack of growth
• Determine if the potential to cross-sell horizontal services has been fulfilled across key verticals

Thorough customer mining is the only way to get a fresh perspective on customers, which could then trigger ideas for new growth opportunities.

#2 Streamlining campaign management processes


We have come a long way from traditional marketing initiatives, where effects were often not measurable. Today, instead of sending out one-way messages and waiting for the market to respond, companies can track the course of the message and make mid-course corrections to improve the impact of the campaign. This ensures that every rupee spent on a lead generation campaign remains well spent.

Here are some small steps that together could substantially enhance a lead generation process:

• Use centralized lead databases with everyone using pre-agreed nomenclatures. This ensures that a consistent view of prospects and customers is built up. Such information or intelligence also becomes the property of the company rather than of a few individuals.
• Use a single common platform – this could be a SaaS platform such as salesforce.com – to share information between different teams such as BD and Sales teams. Online platforms will help you track activity across the organization more efficiently, remove duplication and also help you ensure that prospects are not dropped off quietly during handoffs between teams – such as sales and pre-sales for instance.
• Use inexpensive campaign management software – such as icontact – to track click-backs from e-campaigns. Click path mapping will also help you determine which sections of your website are most effective/interesting.

#3 Enhancing your website


On-line marketing has the power to scale up your sales efforts. More importantly, it can deliver results without burning a hole in your marketing budget. Today, web marketing may seem to be an amalgam of esoteric ideas like web 2.0, community, blogs and Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be so complicated. And it can start with something as simple as your website.

In many cases, websites do not need to be overhauled bottom-up – instead, depending on budgets available, you can deploy new ideas incrementally.

		Web marketing may seem to be an amalgam of esoteric ideas like web 2.0, community, blogs and Twitter, but it doesn’t have to be so complicated. And it can start with something as simple as your website.

One thing to keep in mind is that with the high level of clutter on the Web, it is important to stay fresh – be it in content, visualization or overall navigation. Here are a few ways which will help you add value to your website:

• Use fresh original content – content re-writes that are better attuned to SEO best practices are one of the best ways to add incremental value to your website
• Use strong visual imagery and thematic campaigns
• Incorporate calls to action that directly address market pain points in place of “Contact Us” links
• Re-use site resources through contextual use of content and greater intra-site linking which will also help re-purpose content
• Incorporate RSS Feeds – this is a great way to communicate with customers, prospects, the press and analysts
• Add Blogs to your site – other than the thought leadership angle, they also help improve search scores
• Adopt cross-linking for greater visibility and better SEO scores

#4 Creating high quality proposals


In these days of economic uncertainty, when companies are vying with each other to win business, it is imperative that you generate top notch proposals to set yourself apart. By creating a repository of reusable components, your company can generate good quality RFP responses in the shortest time. The repository should consist of “ready-to-use” proposal objects covering the strengths of the company, key offerings, enablers (such as HR, Training), methodologies and processes, as well as schematics for better illustration. This approach saves time while maintaining a high quality of proposals and strategy.

		The proposal repository should consist of “ready-to-use” proposal objects covering the strengths of the company, key offerings, enablers (such as HR, Training), methodologies and processes, as well as schematics for better illustration.

To sum up, although the recession has lead to a financial upheaval, instead of rehashing your current strategies or trying every marketing scheme from your recession survival handbook, you should instead look to invest in what you already have. The four ideas outlined above are such “incremental ideas” – sometimes it pays to take it one step at a time!