Plan your marketing comeback before full recovery

I'm making two assumptions:

1) A recovery is reasonably close.

2) You'll have to step-up your marketing to get your business back on track.

But before you gussy up a new brochure for your sales staff, put a new face on your Web site or start advertising again, do some strategizing.

Depending on the size and structure of your business, your senior team likely should be involved or maybe your advisory board and specialized consultant or two. Given that the pace of the recovery likely will be slow, you have time to plan.

Here's what your marketing planning process should include:

• Know what you want to accomplish. Do you want to target a weak competitor's customers? Make a splashy return? A slow and steady comeback?

If you know where you want your business to be at this time in 2010, a good marketing team can get you there. If you don't have a this-is-what-I-want-to-see-a-year-from-now goal, then you'll probably spend too much on marketing with disappointing results.

• Take a hard look at the marketplace. It almost certainly has changed. Some customers may be gone. Others may be financially weakened, so much so that you want to change payment terms.

Prospective customers may not be all that they seem. Find out if that hot new prospect pays its bills - or prefers to snake out of deals by claiming product quality issues. There are sources who can research these issues.

Review your suppliers, too. Make certain they still have staying power.

Now you're ready to put together a marketing plan:

• Start with your Web site since Web marketing is faster and generally less expensive. But this time, look at it from the visitor's view.

Your landing page must make visitors want to stay. The site must be easy to navigate; rarely will visitors spend as much as five seconds trying to find whatever they came to see. And the site - graphics and words together - must sell.

An effective ad word strategy can help bring searchers to your site. So can search engine optimization, but few people do that well.

E-newsletters are an inexpensive way to get to customers and prospects. Leave the social sites for later - after your Web site is as good as it should be.

• Advertising. Look at consumer media if that's your market. Be certain to match the demographics you want with the demographics the media offers. Ask for a deal. This is the time to bargain.

• Give your sales team something to use. A good laptop presentation probably is more effective today, but a capabilities brochure that can be left behind will be important for many prospects.

• Get help when you need it.

Questions, comments to Jim Kendall, JKendall @121MarketingResources.com. © 2009 121 Marketing Resources, Inc.