Use Marketing to Stay Strong in a Weak Economy

Shrewd business owners see opportunity in a down market.

By Tami Hernandez

Today’s companies face the challenge of marketing in an economic state of turbulence and uncertainty. The key to maintaining forward momentum in today’s market is to resolve to be competitive and shift to an opportunistic mind-set. Rather than focusing on the turbulence, your company should leverage the dynamics of a down market and become an even stronger competitor. A weak economy can actually serve as an opportunity to evaluate your marketing and public relations initiatives so you can make them more effective and efficient.

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Sure the economy is still bad and sales are still down. Customers and clients alike are wary of spending, concerned with returns on every single investment. Some are low on cash and other are out of credit.

However, small businesses do have hope…

A recent survey shows growth is still possible for small businesses with the right strategy and you can join the ranks of those starting their growth spurt right now by investing better, marketing smarter and getting creative.

Check out the Small Business Trends roundup here: SBN RoundUp

So you are a bank, you’ve just signed your ten thousandth customer, your coffers are flowing with deposits from your investors, you have a healthy debt to credit ratio – all key performance indicators that define competitive success are green and show an upward trend. Did you know though, that the bank next door, your primary competition may be doing even better than you are, that your key performance indicators, though all green, may be actually under par than the accepted industry standards.

Moving forward, when did you, as a business, last benchmark yourself against your immediate and not-so-immediate competition. Are you losing out on potential business due to your competitor providing better deposit plans? If you feel this is the case, it is perhaps time that you got your business ‘benchmarked’.

Benchmarking is the process of comparing the business processes and performance metrics including cost, cycle time, productivity or quality to another that is widely considered as an industry standard or best practice. Essentially, benchmarking provides a snapshot of the performance of your business and helps you understand where you are in relation to a particular standard. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices.

Benchmarking may be treated as a one-off event but it helps if benchmarking is done on an ongoing basis to keep your business performance at the industry accepted levels and in doing so, helps you optimize processes and raise the bar to continually stay ahead of your competition.

Business owners must come to understand the importance of benchmarking and adopt an all encompassing methodology to benchmark their business by recognizing the exact methodology that is suitable for your business.