Should you advertise in a down economy?

Most of my clients own or manage midsize companies. Some are finding new opportunities and improving sales numbers during the current economic downturn. Others, not so much.

A few years ago, I developed a presentation that looks at advertising in a recession from the 30 thousand foot level. It asks a simple question: Why advertise in a down economy? This slide show walks you through the process I use in strategic planning sessions or workshops for CEOs and senior executives.

To view in full screen mode, click the SlideShare logo, then click the full screen icon on the slide show control bar. If you prefer a “flat” article, here’s a link that will help.

Also, here’s a post with questions the CEO of a midsize company should ask before cutting the marketing budget.

What business are you in?

When I work with a coaching client, I ask a lot of questions starting with…

– What business are you in?
– What products do you sell?
– What services do you provide?

When a potential customer takes a look at your website, brochure, mailer, biz card…

– What do you want them to learn?
– What do you want them to think?
– What do you want them to feel?
– What do you want them to know?
– What do you want them to do?

When it comes to websites, I ask…

– What problem(s) does your website solve?
– … for whom?

When I get a sense of the answers from my client’s perspective, I ask…

– How would your marketing team answer these questions?
– How about your sales team?
– How would your customers answer them?
– How do you know?

If the answer to the last question is not convincing — and it almost never is — I suggest that we work on finding a way to get solid answers to these questions before we do anything else. It is rare for a CEO, sales manager, marketing director and a select group of customers to agree on a description of a business and its products/services, let alone the message(s) they are trying to communicate.

If you think it is time to make sure your company is strategically aligned, here are some real world tools from Kevin Connolly, marketing guy.

Keep your company’s message fresh.

Small to midsize companies struggle to keep their message fresh and their websites up to date. So do marketing coaches and other service providers. Fortunately, there are free tools that make it easy to get the word out. There may be dozens, but I want to talk about FeedBurner.

This morning, I wondered of I could use my blog posts to drive fresh content to the home page of my website. I had used FeedBurner to set up an RSS feed, so readers could subscribe to my blog. I wondered if they might have a way to deliver the feed to my website.

Five minutes of research tops and I found the answer. They call it BuzzBoost. In effect, it turns a portion of a webpage into an RSS reader. You click a few buttons, complete a couple data fields, and SAVE. When the BuzzBoost page refreshes, it gives you a little bit of html code to copy into your webpage. Here’s a link to my home page so you can see the result of my efforts.

Here’s how I did it…

Does a company blog make sense?

Can blogging take the place of a company website? My take is that blogging can be an incredible waste of time, it can also be a useful marketing tool. I use my blog the way marketers used to use printed brochures… to support my message. I also have a “proper” website. I use them both to support my networking efforts as a marketing/internet strategy coach.

Midsize businesses can use blogging if they are able to afford the time and effort to create meaningful content.