As we enter the new year, many marketers are looking for ways to do more with less. EGC has compiled the Top 10 best practices that will make a marketing budget go further.

1. Reevaluate Your Brand and Value Proposition: Now is the time to reexamine your brand.  Are the promises your brand is making to prospective buyers what is being delivered? Before reviewing how to spend your marketing budget, it’s important to make sure that you are delivering the right message. An online study can help determine what your clients and customers see as your brand attributes, and why they prefer you over your competitors. Once you determine what your own customers think about your brand, you can better promote the real brand benefits that are most meaningful to other prospects.
    
2. Retain Your Current Customers and Clients: In today’s economic climate, your competitors are after your customers and looking to woo them with additional incentives and discounts. We at EGC are consistently referring to Forester’s research, which found “Businesses in many industries may lose up to 50% of their customers over a five-year period; those customers tend to be replaced by less tenured, less loyal customers.” Your customer communication program can be as simple as an e-newsletter to your customer database. Or it can be a more complex undertaking in which you segment customers behaviors and send out personalized mailings. Your clients and customers want to know that you care enough about them to stay in touch. In addition, you have the opportunity to use your customer database for new customers via referral programs. And perhaps best of all, programs like these are often extremely low cost. So, either simple or complex, be consistent with a customer communication program and you’ll see ROI in 2009.
    
3. Target: Now that you’ve reviewed your brand and put a program in place to retain existing customers it’s important to make sure that your marketing effort to new customers is focused. Are you really reaching the people most likely to buy your product or use your service? Fortunately, there there are a lot of targeting tools available today. Two of the favored techniques at The EGC Group are using direct customer research, and through a prospect-profiling technique that links your customer data with consumer demographics, syndicated survey data and survey research to reveal exactly which types of consumers are most likely to use your products. This is called PRIZM NE. For more on this topic, please refer to: http://www.egcgroup.com/blog/?p=72.
    
4. Negotiate, Negotiate, Negotiate: Media partners, printing vendors and other partners are all feeling the same economic crunch as you. Now is the time to work with them and negotiate for better positioning, better placement, and more for your advertising dollar. At EGC, our partners are exactly that, partners. They care about our clients’ business just as much as we do, so it’s in their best interest to offer the most added-value possible to make a client’s campaign successful.
    
5. Maximize Your Online Presence: In 2008 EGC saw an increase in the online spending of our clients’ advertising budgets, and overall the shifts in budgets met with successful results. We’ve seen enough ROI to continue to shift more budgets toward online media. Many marketers, as Tony Valado has cited in the November Interactive Insider, know the value of search marketing and continue to dedicate budgets toward this effort. However, there are many other online media opportunities available that can deliver optimum results. The banner ad, for example, has gotten a bad rap, but there are new ways to use online media: behavioral targeting, content targeting, and more.
    
6. Go Social (carefully): Social Media Networks like MySpace, Facebook, etc. became a hot point for marketers in 2008. Many marketers rushed to take part and included Social Media as part of their marketing budget, and not everyone saw returns from their efforts. The benefit of Social Networking sites is that it allows for true, honest, dialogue with the end user. However, this often becomes a forum for negative user feedback and can be hard to control. In addition, many Social Networking site users react adversely to the usual “mass advertising” on their turf. So how can you get more ROI from Social Networking sites in 2009? First, consider adjusting your social networking ad buy to be “hyper-targeted,” looking to reach those groups who are the best prospects for your message. Second, adjust your message so that is in line with the space…traditional messages don’t work here. Third, think outside the box and consider these sites as event forums and an avenue to test the nontraditional: conduct an online event, host an online contest, offer an online game…but most of all make sure your message and budget are targeted to make the most of these communities.
    
7. Make Your Traditional Media Nontraditional: Now is the time to work with media partners to make traditional media more impactful. Many print partners have opened up to going beyond the traditional full-page ad, like sticky notes, pop-ups, etc. to make sure that their advertiser’s message is more impactful than ever. Many broadcast partners have opened up interactive applications to campaigns, such as interactive voting features as seen here.
    
8. Event Marketing: Events are a great way to get in front of a targeted audience, or in front of the masses. In 2009, we predict event marketing will grow in popularity. Consumers everywhere are skipping vacations and expensive nights out and are looking for something to do. So be on the lookout for community events in your area and consider participating with an interactive booth. We predict that those local fairs and festivals will be seeing more attendees than ever. Or consider hosting your own informational seminar/webinar. Make sure you capture the data of everyone you speak to/meet, and build them into your customer communications program.
    
9. Refine Tracking and Analysis: Traditionally, if you’re not a direct response advertiser, your measurements and analytics of marketing and advertising campaigns may not be very detailed, thus making it difficult to gauge the response to your campaigns. Consider setting up more precise measurements by: assigning promo codes to your campaigns, using detailed tracking in your phone scripts and on your online contact forms, or as EGC has done, join with third party partners like Who’s Calling or TMP Direct. Either way, you will be more informed in 2009 on what works and what doesn’t.
    
10. Ask the Experts: In 2009, we’re likely to experience uncharted economic waters, and you will need a team behind you to help navigate them. The EGC Group has a host of experts in the topics of Brand Building, Research, Media Negotiation, Event Marketing, Customer Retention, Online Media, Strategic Marketing, traditional advertising and more. Call 516-935-4944 and we’d be happy to meet with you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under The Latest Trends in Marketing, posted by Nicole Larrauri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.