• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
  • Growth Strategies
  • How & Why
  • Publications
  • Newsletters
  • Testimonials
  • Contact

Hilltop Consultancy

  • Marketing
  • Organic Growth
  • New Business Growth
  • Franchising/Licensing
  • Acquisition
  • Methods
  • Exit Planning

Marketing Your Way Out Of A Recession

23rd May 2018 By admin

WAITING FOR THE PHONE TO RING?

Talking to a small business owner the other day, I asked where most of their business came from. “Oh, you know”,came the airy reply, “word of mouth mostly”.”So you don’t do much marketing then?” “Well no, none”.All this with a cheery confidence-nonchalance even.

You hear it all the time:”The phone usually rings”. Except when it eventually doesn’t. Like in a recession; or when all of the ‘contacts’have been finally milked dry. Or both.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the power of networking (though many of the people I’m referring to don’t even do that in any concerted or organised fashion); and I do accept that many of the traditional methods of communicating features, advantages and benefits to target markets are changing radically, with the ever-growing influence of digital media.

But just relying on word of mouth is like a golfer lugging his golf bag round the course with just a putter in it. Not much use when you’re in the rough.

MARKETING YOUR WAY OUT OF A RECESSION

There is of course much detailed market research (if you’d like a sample, e-mail me and I’ll send you the links) which demonstrates unequivocally that businesses which continue to invest in marketing during a recession come out at the end of it hundreds of percentage points in front of rivals who cut spending. The big brands have learned their lessons from the last two or three recessions, on the whole.

What, though, of small businesses? I get the distinct impression that many still treat marketing as an expense rather than an investment to be tested and measured for cost-effectiveness over time,and adjusted and amended accordingly. An expense that seems like an easy option to put a red pencil through when cost cutting is on the agenda.

All the evidence of course points to such action being a self-fulfilling prophesy: failing to plan is planning to fail, as the saying goes, and marketing planning is the most vital of all.The businesses that survive and thrive during a recession are those that maintain good business habits and practices, whatever the prevailing economic conditions.

There’s no particular magic about marketing: it is essentially a numbers game, like most of business. The more people know about your products or services (and their respective unique selling points), the more the phone rings. Nor do you have to invest huge sums to make a big practical difference to your business. But you can’t just sit on your thumbs and wait for the phone to ring “like it always has done”. Because one not so fine day, and particularly during a recession, it will stop, and so will your business.

Filed Under: Marketing

Studiopress Themes & Genesis

Studiopress Themes and Genesis, Click Here

This website is built using the Magazine Pro Theme, Click Here

Why Genesis is the Foundation of Any Smart WordPress Design, Click Here

Primary Sidebar

Hilltop Newsletter

Sign up to get updates about our business and industry.

Hilltop Bugle Newsletter

Recent Posts

  • Growing Sustainably
  • Systems and Processes
  • 10 Best Ways To Achieve Growth
  • Loyalty: Too Often Taken For Granted?
  • Importance of After Sales Service

Key Posts

10 Best Ways To Achieve Growth

Your Uncommon Offering

Exit Strategies

Mergers & Acquisitions

Growth

Free Gift For You

Eden Project: Strategy for Growth

Team Building

Do You Have A Vision?

Advertisement

Free booklet for every reader

This 50-page booklet summarises everything you need to know about business growth. Send for your free copy (paper or electronic) to dave@hilltopconsultancy.co.uk

 

A 320-page personal record of setting up, growing and selling a marketing agency: part memoir, part business handbook, part comic novel.  Set in Oxford in the 1980’s and 90’s it documents the fun and games, and pain and heartache we telescoped into 12 short years. The title is taken from the scurrilous in-house ‘newsletter’ our creative department compiled a couple of times a year, to debunk any of our employees who… oh, just anyone who worked for us (including me).

Interested? The first chapter is free at www.theunprincipled.com  If you want to acquire a copy, it is available through Amazon, on Kindle, or through your local bookshop (they will have to order it for you) – or just ask me for a copy direct via dave@hilltopconsultancy.co.uk

Here is a film of an interview with me about the book, shot at Langan’s restaurant in London.

Footer

Contact details

Landline (preferred out here in the sticks): 01844 237450

Mobile: 07836 334150

E-mail: dave@hilltopconsultancy.co.uk

Recent Posts

  • Growing Sustainably
  • Systems and Processes
  • 10 Best Ways To Achieve Growth
  • Loyalty: Too Often Taken For Granted?

Search this site…

Copyright © 2021 · Studiopress Themes - Genesis - Magazine Pro Theme - Click Here · · Privacy Policy · · Terms of Use