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So, apparently a recession in the UK is now almost inevitable (ref).

Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. The relentless negative sway of reporting is talking us all into it, but I guess these things do come in cycles so perhaps 2008 may be a challenging year… if you so decide.

I like to stay positive. Already this month I have read about ASOS, GAME and Morrisons all doing very well thank you very much and it gives me a more positive outlook.

Yes, people don’t want what they used to want, but we are still trying to sell it to them despite saturated markets.

And what about differentiation - marketing and brand - which is one of the key areas of spend that starts getting cut in tough times when surely it is the time to be pushing rather than pulling?

Recognition

The first part of solving the problem for your business is recognising the patterns and who is doing well in your industry - what have that got that you don’t?

Are your services and products still relevant or have they moved on. Take The Escape…

Design and web creation is now more accessible - you can even save a Word file as a web page.

So, some small businesses are creating their own design, using relatives who are ‘creative’ or by using Powerpoint and clip-art. The trade-off between cost and quality of desktop colour is acceptable for them so they chose to do some of the things themselves, that five years ago they may have needed us for.

The same with web. We don’t (and can’t) compete with Frontpage or Dreamweaver but it is an option for small business to reduce costs. Last week, we lost a website project because someone’s friend had just set up a business doing websites from home.

But, is this approach a false economy? It’s marketing and it needs measurable results.

Effective marketing is about reaching and engaging a relevant audience and your company’s offering needs to be refined, explained and differentiated so that you engage your target market.

At The Escape we did this, so now we “create business websites that get actual results”. And, we can prove it with our design, web and online marketing case studies… it’s a lot more compelling in terms of a definable business offering.

By defining what you really excel at, you can compete on the higher ground, especially if you can spread the word effectively and this is where the web comes in for two reasons.

1. You have more competition and some of them have much lower overheads than you can ever imagine - can you, and should you, compete?
2. You have more reach with relevant people on the web - if they can find you and engage.

Capitalising on reach

The key to making the most of your reach is to answer the age old business edict of “supply a demand”. What’s more, you then go on to tell everyone about it using content that people can identify with.

If you are truly good at what you do and your offering answers a problem, then you have a viable business - but you have to validate your market position.

If you are not already, refine your case studies, create white papers; start showing off.

You gotta ‘tell it to sell it’ and if a recession is on it’s way, it’s time to start shouting!

Blind acceptance is no longer the norm.

Whilst there are some that will follow many said truths, a larger number of people have the awareness to follow their curiosity, especially with immense online search capabilities. This is despite a childhood that may have discouraged this behaviour. Don’t you know that “Curiosity killed the cat“?

In fact, school was the same. “Fact” after “fact” imparted by people who know best. They don’t want you to “think outside the box” just follow the text book.

As an adult and realising that most countries are force-fed an element of censored history, I rebelled and got hungry myself, questioning my own beliefs, as well as at work, where I needed to prove ‘marketing ideas’ to myself before I would accept right or wrong.

Seth Godin talks about this kind of curiosity in a 5 minute video by Monday9am.

Cross this sociological pattern over to your business and you soon start to realise that, in knowledge-based service industries, your clients are the same. They want information, and it needs to lead to results.

Example in point, I launched two free web seminars last Friday and less than four days later they are both nearly full with knowledge-hungry clients.

Knowledge marketing and Thought Leadership attracts profile online that can lead to client-acquisition.

The chances are these inquisitive clients will have the same dedication throughout their job role: Hungrier for success and maximizing their results, which in turn reflects on your service offering leading to more successful case study data.

This is a core element of the DMA environmental strategy.

Accurate, relevant data is vital.

Did you know that around 15,000 people either die or move premises every single day in the UK?

Your data is never going to be 100% accurate but if you don’t update or suppress it then the problem of the decay just keeps on growing. And business data decay is much, much greater than consumer data.

Every time you don’t do it, every time you send something out to the wrong person at the wrong address - that’s another black mark against your brand.

So think about it, when was the last time you cleaned your data?

I often talk about content and how you can create articles to attract relevant search traffic. Of course, there is no reason why it can’t be focussed towards your existing clients.

I had a meeting with a potential new client last week who is doing this already. I liked her approach.

Basically, she goes to existing client sites and spends half a day discussing the issues they have around what her company supply, in this case IT network services. It is market specific, in this case it was regarding the network security issues in schools.

She then takes the feedback and writes white papers focusing on the problems, putting in time to do research and creating solutions.

This is then utilised as e-mail marketing material to existing clients.

It takes time but the point is that it is content that answers a problem, one of the first rules of advertising.

The chances are, your customers don’t care about you. Perhaps you think they really do, so sorry to shatter that illusion.

They are busy at work in their own worlds, with their own problems and they are bombarded, hence they get apathetic to anything that does not directly affect them personally.

Personal example in point. I watched a documentary series last week about chicken farming. It changed my thoughts about free-range versus supermarket meat and I vowed to start buying free-range. I am, however, in a minority.

According to Smart Planet, the Super Market feedback from the series actually seemed show an increase in sales of chickens across the board. It seems that people simply don’t care enough. In fact, I ‘had’ to buy an off-the-shelf chicken last night at my local Tesco Express when they didn’t have free-range left.

It’s a hard battle to win and it’s important to remember, especially for small businesses, that it’s not personal.

One way to potentially overcome customer apathy is to offer regular communication that answers their ’selfish’ requirement, ie. What’s in it for me?

E-mail newsletters, RSS feeds, even telephone calls, allow us to easily communicate and engage with our clients regularly and the more relevant your ‘this is what’s in it for you’ can be… the better.

Stories like this one about a software firm wanted to charge for their free online tool make me chuckle. Maybe I’m just getting to geeky these days?

Free online tools, like industry-specific calculators, are great. They are easy to create and distribute and the value in offering them on your website is not in the short-term returns you may get for charging for them, but in the long-term brand equity you begin to build from increased profile.

Our free web page analyzer tool achieves this for us and I know some competing web developers out there use it and good luck to them. The tool has also encouraged a massive amount of link love, which in turn has raised our online profile.

It offers an idea that we know what we are talking about when it comes to creating web sites and that is what we are selling - the websites.

I appreciate this approach differs from the software firm mentioned in the news article, but they need to understand that they, like all of us, can not control the web and we can’t control the visitors to our websites.

If you show a bit of up-front love on your website, with knowledge building freebies - you may get some back in return.

Scrabulous is an online version of the game Scrabble, written by two brothers, that has risen in popularity of late as a Facebook application.

The joint owners of Scrabble, Mattel and Hasbro, launched an action on Tuesday saying that the Scrabulous game was a “gross copyright and trademark infringement”. The companies asked Facebook to remove Scrabulous. (ref. BBC)

This in itself is a fair enough point, but are they missing the point? Games become popular because they get played. On the INternet, they are easy for programmers to recreate… and spread, especiallyu when they encourage a viral attitude. IE. you have to play with someone else, so you tell you friends.

For instance, Scrabulous has grown to regularly get more than 500,000 users a day playing. The interesting thing about consumers (and especially younger generations) is that they don’t understand why they shouldn’t be able to play this game online, and for free.

Subsequently, over 18,000 people have asked the same question through Jason Madhosingh’s Facebook Group - Save Scrabulous.

Surely, a more positive [brand] approach would be to agree a licence fee with the people who wrote the application?

I completely agree that they own the copyright and have rights, but they will miss out on brand recognition (500,000 users a DAY) and a passive income stream that could be utilised.

If it were me, I’d actually buy the application and create additional cross-selling.

The thing is, a bnit like file sharing platforms, it won’t be long before someone else creates a new version, and when they get shut down, someone else….

… and every marketing exec

From the Design Police

…via Advertising Goodness

So, I’m eating my lunch: A nice jacket potato with tuna and mayo and, I’m eating it with a spoon.

I love spoons. They’re like a knife and fork rolled into one with no gaps for dropping things - a highly efficient piece of cutlery.

I use spoons a lot when I eat. Whenever I go to a restaurant and the meal is right, I ask for a spoon - even if they roll their eyes at me.

I know it’s a bit babyish and not good etiquette (I don’t use a spoon at formal occasions I might add) and I do get chastised for it sometimes but, it’s my choice to use one based on a set of criteria I have set MYSELF about cutlery, ie. just choose the easiest option.

So, why am I telling you this?

You probably have a service offering or products that you see as knives and forks whereas your customers may see them as spoons. Maybe they prefer spoons… The question is, do you educate them, or do you educate yourself to change?