Marketing your business during a recession

One of the major rules of marketing is to keep in touch with your existing clients, keep them aware of your existence, inform them of any changes to the service or products that you offer, and more importantly the benefits that you can offer them, especially during a recession.

The main mistakes made by many businesses during hard times, is to cut back on marketing. It’s usually one of the first areas to have budgets reduced, this is not only the wrong thing to do, it is also very dangerous.

If you decide to cut back, or even stop your promotional activities, your clients or customers could be left wide open to approaches from a more pro-active competitor.

How difficult is it to pick up the phone and contact your clients? Find out how their business is doing, is there any way you can help? Show some concern (after all if their business fails, you lose a client), offer ideas, e-mail articles that can assist them, and, if you can, offer them some sort of ‘special deal’… buy now pay later… a discount for bulk purchase… even an offer of free storage and delivery. There are lots of ways that you can make a positive impression to build and strengthen your customer loyalty.

More importantly, these special deals don’t need to cost you a lot of money, utilise what you already have and adapt to meet your clients needs. A little help and assistance now, especially in these hard times, will surely create more business for you in the long run.

http://www.enable-creativity.co.uk

Preparing an effective creative brief

Great creative ideas rarely occur in a vacuum – they are more likely to be a response to a clearly defined problem. So whether you’re dealing with an external agency or handling the job in-house, it pays to start with a comprehensive, detailed creative brief.

Take your time. Get it right. Cover all aspects of the project, and make the briefing information as complete as you can. This gives the creative team the best possible chance of producing work that gets results.

Who defines the brief?
The briefing team should certainly include whoever evaluates the brief, and whoever has the final say.

A comprehensive brief will need information about your product or service and target audience. Ideally, therefore, the team should also include people from marketing, sales and research.

TIP: Try and include the creative team in preparing the brief. They can be invaluable in making sure you cover all points, and produce a clear, focused document.

Measurable objectives?
The more specific the brief, the easier it is to assess the results of the creative work. Although it isn’t always possible to set a measurable objective, this should be the goal.

Defining the Brief
The heart of a comprehensive creative brief should include:

• background information on your company and project
• project objectives
• competitor information
• description of the target audience
• main benefits of the product or service
• core message or propositions
• the response you want from the project.

View the full article here.
http://www.enable-creativity.co.uk/pdfs/creative_brief.pdf