SPIDERbytes

I’ve been getting a lot of advice from business owners across a wide spectrum of industries. Some have experienced downturns and recessions (remember interest rates exceeding 18% in the 80’s?). Some are new to this kind of environment but have “old business souls.” Others are like deer in headlights not sure what’s coming next, what’s behind the light, how big, long, etc. But, a common theme is emerging, and that is: “hunker down” and “practice your business fundamentals.”

Hunker Down

The Hunkering Down part is an interesting tactic. To me it means that we operate as efficiently as possible, cutting any fat from our payroll and other expenses, and not incurring any expenses that we can’t live without. Depending on how hard your business has been hit by the trickle down impact of the economy, this may mean cutting payroll further than you’d like and even delaying payments to conserve cash. For some, it means operating in survival mode, to ensure you’ll be there when we emerge out of this mess.

Fortunately, for SPIDERtel, we have a large base of customers and we continue to thrive with a mix of recurring revenues, committed-to project work, and many new opportunities. That’s not to suggest that we haven’t been impacted at all. In fact, we have been hit in a very hard way. In the span of two weeks, for instance, we lost business amounting to 7% of our revenues. That’s a big wallop for anyone. But, the truth is, we were very close to hunkering down anyway, and with a little bit of pinching here and there, and some additional growth that we actually see coming, the impact of this bad news will not be significant.

Practice Your Business Fundamentals

It’s actually the advice of “Practice Your Business Fundamentals” that has me curious, because aren’t we supposed to be doing that anyway? Don’t excellent businesses already practice their fundamentals all the time?

What are the business fundamentals? Ah here’s why it’s more challenging than it looks. There are dozens and dozens of them, from Human Resources, to Operations, to Financials, to Customer Service to Logistics. Far too many to list and most are way beyond any single business class (or any set of text books altogether). But, the idea of business fundamentals is to distill the issues and objectives of any business problem and apply principals of action to them.

For example, in Marketing, we should do the following

• Know who you are, your lines of business, your excellence, your audience
• Develop and promote your brand with disciplined intent and focus
• Target your audience as precisely as possible and differentiate yourself from your competition
• Measure and test your advertising so you know what’s successful and what’s not
• Rinse and repeat

 

So, I ask myself, why would an economic downturn cause us to act on our marketing principals? Shouldn’t we be doing this all the time? If it makes sense now, it should make sense always.

The answer is, of course we apply these principals to our business at all times, during hard and good times. It’s during hard times that some of us may be scrambling to look for ways to be more successful and improve our business. But, in reality, the successful businesses are those that have been practicing business fundamentals all along, and perhaps even hunkering down.

Apply This to The Web

Marketing on the web, as I will write about here often, has its own set of business fundamentals, that include the following:

Web Sites

• Have one. It’s as essential as your business card. If you don’t get that, skip reading the rest.
• Target your audience. Understand who they are and what they want. Deliver it.
• Make it about them. It’s not about you. It’s about the questions and needs of your audience.
• Cater to your prospects and clients. Both have unique needs.
• It’s 2/47: Build functionality that allows them to interact with you at all times.
• Design must have purposes. It might look great, but if it doesn’t serve a business purpose, bag it.
• Collect contact information. Use it for your other marketing efforts.

 

Search Engine Marketing

• The search engines are not evil. They are really trying to deliver the highest quality information to searches based on their intent, which is often hard to decipher.
• Stop asking if your prospects are looking for you there. They are.
• You can use search marketing to your advantage, always, despite the massive competition.
• Know that there may be so much competition that you need to be realistic about your costs and approach.
• Make sure you are working with professionals, to avoid costly or irreversible damage.
• Organic marketing is a long term investment.

 

Social Media Marketing

• OK. So there’s a frenzy out there, it’s evolving and we don’t understand how to do it correctly yet. Don’t let that stop you. Start now with some already proven tactics (Linked In, Blogs, Twitter etc.)
• No one has all the answers. Run away from anyone that claims they do.
• Make it about a personality in your business, and not about the business. People want to talk to people not entities.
• It’s working. It works for a number of reasons, despite the hype. It influences thought and helps create real relationships. People do business with people they know, like and trust. Go figure.

 

Email Marketing

• To date, perhaps the most cost effective method of targeted marketing.
• Don’t spam, ever!! There’s no reason to.
• Drive them. Drive them to action. Drive them to your web site.
• Measure. Test. Measure.

 

Traditional Advertising

• Don’t stop, just be smart about it.
• If you haven’t changed how you’re spending your ad dollars in the past few years, that’s clearly not smart. It’s time to review.
• Drive them to your web site.
• You can measure the effectiveness of your ad dollars through the web.

 

So What?

“Hunkering Down” may indeed be a tactic that we employ under severe circumstances. It may get more severe, but it’s hard to imagine how. The time is now, “Hunker Down.”

But don’t be stupid about it. Don’t ignore the tremendous opportunity to market yourself in ways that your competition is not or are retracting from in order to save their money. Now is the best time to “Practice your Business Fundamentals” and aggressively market. There are infinite ways to market your business on the web cost-effectively. Start today and don’t ever stop!!