Raise your hand if you're trying to hit plan with fewer marketing resources than you had last year or the year before. Okay, that looks like just about everybody; put your hands down.
Knowing what specific strategy works may be difficult to determine, but here are 12 strategies you should consider when facing limited marketing dollars and people:
- Don't make across the board cuts - it's easy to do the math, but it leads to crappy results. Go all in on high potential, innovative strategies and cut others out completely.
- Stop doing things that don't add value for customers. Ask them what they don't use or need, and especially find out what you do they're not even aware of. All candidates for elimination.
- Don't eliminate your thinking time. It's easy (and stupid) to think you can stop strategic thinking as a way to save time and get on with implementation. With fewer resources, you'll need planning to make sure you get things right the first time. It's painful and costly to fix screw-ups once you discover them in-market.
- Set your goals higher to force radically re-considering how you deliver for customers. It seems contradictory, but stiffer goals will push you to explore what really matters and what you're willing to sacrifice today for potential success tomorrow.
- Figure out who else in your organization has appropriate talents & might want to help grow the business. A lot of times people are looking for new ways to contribute, grow, and develop strategically when there aren't dollars for training.
- Build on strategies you already have in place. Don't needlessly create new messaging with no built-in awareness. Even something generally on strategy may work harder for you than the perfect strategy which requires starting from scratch in getting customers to understand it.
- Beyond using what you already have in place, see if strategies that have worked previously might be right to pull out again. Chances are if a strategy resonated before, some part of your audience will remember it, making the sell-in easier.
- Also test some innovative concepts you explored before but never used. Is now the time to try them out in a new market situation?
- As you plan your marketing strategy, make sure everything you do is designed to create multiple impacts. You have to get more from what you do if you're going to be successful. It's too expensive to pursue strategies which will work in only one-off market situations.
- Make sure you're taking advantage of every customer contact to test, learn, and/or adjust your marketing mix. You may not have dollars for formal research, so you need to learn as much as you can every day, even if the learning methods are non-traditional. Adjust and learn what you can.
- Stretch your team in new ways to make them stronger performers and better leaders. Muscles get stronger when you challenge them repeatedly. Same with people and teams.
- Strengthening muscles also need time to recover if they're going to get bigger. Same with people and teams. Make time to celebrate great contributions and the wins you deliver to help sustain and motivate your team.
Those are my twelve. What would you add to the list? - Mike Brown
