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Is your marketing house being blown down?
Marketing in a downturn is something that’s being given quite a lot of attention recently – and rightly so. As customers reign in their spending it becomes harder than ever for businesses to convince them – through advertising – to part with their hard earned cash.
While it rarely helps to tell people what they should have done it is important that businesses take the opportunities they have, to address the marketing efforts that aren’t working and start implementing ones that will.
Marketing With Straw and Sticks
In the Three Little Pigs fairytale, three porkies who are being chased by the Big Bad (Recession) Wolf build three houses – one of straw, one of sticks and one of bricks.
Marketing a business through traditional marketing methods is increasingly like the piggy’s straw and sticks efforts. It’s quick and all the other little piggies have been building that way for years. Moreover it’s probably worked perfectly well in the past for you too.
But a few quick puffs from the wolf at the door and stick-based brands start tumbling all around us.
The problem is that the materials are short term solutions – temporary shelters if you like. They may work reasonably well when conditions are easy but they don’t really provide a long-term solution.
Once you’ve built your structure you need to keep coming back for more sticks and straw and 30-second TV spots to hold it all together. If you stop – or your advertising suddenly becomes less effective – you might be in a spot of bother as your porcine customer base starts looking elsewhere for more substance.
How to Build a Marketing Plan Out of Bricks
A brick built house, on the other hand, is much more of an asset. It certainly takes longer to build – and is more of an effort in the short term – but ultimately it is better suited to withstanding whatever gets thrown at it.
And unlike straw and sticks, once it’s built, it’ll continue to serve you well for years to come. Building your business with marketing bricks means choosing methods that become more effective over time, not less. It means less advertising and more asset building.
The moral of our little tale? Build marketing assets.
Marketing assets grow in value over time and continue to deliver returns long after the initial costs of creating them. A customer community is an asset. A content-filled website with hundreds of inbound links is an asset. A well-built opt-in database is an asset. Once built they are inherently valuable – not for their structure but for their content.
Content builds marketing assets in the same way that bricks build physical assets.
So as you cut your advertising spend and reign in your direct mail efforts, re-focus your resources on building assets.
Think of it this way, when the economic recovery starts to kick in and all the little piggies come out from hiding, how much would a customer forum with thousands of loyal, engaged participants be worth to your business?
{ 2 comments }
Excellent Post Mark,
Great analogy, short, to the point and everyone knows the background story which reinforces your argument. The only problem is that when times are good, many people rely on the ‘house of straw’ marketing when they should be investing in bricks just in case there is a ‘wolf’ coming in the future. By the time a recession arrives (and this one has arrived quickly with very little warning) in may be too late to start trying to build your content because of the investment in time and money required.
Thanks for the kind words Nigel.
I agree that the best time to start building content is before the wolf is at the door but here’s my take on why now is still better than tomorrow …
As advertising proves less effective for many businesses they will begin to cut their traditional advertising budgets. Some of that budget will simply be shelved, for some there’ll be no budget to speak of and for others it will be reinvested in other forms of marketing.
For those who are shelving it or reinvesting it, I would say that a proportion should be dedicated to creating content. They’re not likely to go from no content to 100% content marketing overnight but a gradual shift in focus is certainly a start.
In terms of cost, custom content usually stacks up pretty well against advertising costs. A customer magazine can easily cost less than a spot at a trade show – a well-conceived blog (and help writing it) can be achieved for as little £4-500 a month.
For those with no budget at all then the options are even clearer – either do nothing and hope things improve or get started creating content in-house now.
Tough times have a habit of bringing things into sharp relief – for me the current economic gloom is a perfect excuse to start pitching more long term solutions.
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