The World of Informed Marketers™

In these challenging economic times, we’re finding that many marketing organizations are asked to deliver the same top line revenue number (or more) with fewer resources across the board.  The paradox this creates is obvious – in a market where overall spending is on the decline, how can you deliver greater top line and stay competitive without making even more investment in marketing?

In an ideal world, those investments would be viable – but a world where the Dow drops 25% within the first 60 days of the year is far from ideal.

SO – what can YOU do about it?  Here’s a list of 9 things we might recommend:

1. Put the data that you already have, to work. Look internally, get your hands on the data, and put it to work.  Most of the companies we talk to already have a lot of great data.  Sure, we help add quite a bit to that, but it doesn’t mean that there cannot be some analysis done based on information that is already in the organization.  Try this exercise – go talk to 3 or 4 marketing managers that handle programs where customer data is collected.  Even if it’s in spreadsheets, look across 4-5 spreadsheets and see if you can compile one customer record.  This exercise will help you start to understand what your customers look like, and the accuracy of your company’s understanding of that customer.  This in turn can help you identify which are the really interesting campaigns and which ones you can do without for the time being.
2. Hammer on the campaigns that worked. One thing I’ve seen over the past few years, especially in what I might call “high performance” marketing organizations, are smaller projects that got great results but were not big enough to be meaningful in the grand scheme of things.  A more budget constrained environment could provide a good opportunity to take a look at what some of the results were, even on a small scale.  For example, look at very simple metrics like % of respondents to an email campaign, or # of registrations for a special offer in comparison to impressions or those targeted.  While not super useful in a small context, try repeating that same experiment 3 or 4 more times and see if you can produce the same results as the program did initially.  The program that was “insignificant in size” just became 4x larger, and 4x more successful.
3. Start small and TEST. Our product team has worked extremely hard to be obsessive about putting in features like this, because a.) its really difficult to test and b.) there are not many tools available that make it easy.  But if you can, force yourself and your organization to take a few extra days to test.  If you happen to have a big campaign launching, see if you can even randomly carve out 1% – 3% of targets and launch a limited campaign.  The results you find may be surprising – but will ensure that the end result will drive results and not be a waste of precious marketing dollars.
4. Ask your customers critical questions. Shrinking budgets certainly have a trickle down, trickle over, and trickle up effect.  Use that as an opportunity to share your challenges with customers, and ask them very directly what theirs are.  There are many ways to do this – including leveraging online market research tools, or asking your sales force to poll customers with 2-3 quick questions about how your products and services can continue to serve them well.
5. Use email. Seems obvious, but many of you might still be paying a pretty penny to get email campaigns out the door.  Try any combination of the following: 1.) Broaden the audience to which email is blasted, and measure the delta in response rates, click-throughs, etc.  2.) Send more frequent emails to those who have been responding well (but don’t get too trigger happy) 3.) instead of investing in a beautiful HTML designed email, think about just a banner at the top and run the rest in text.  Could save you thousands in creative and other fees.
6. Look for ways to supplant existing budgets. This is absolutely a time to start thinking about a better mouse trap.  Take a look at how much is being spent on things like email communication, customer insight, and analytics and see where there are cheaper, or even free tools that can start to replace other more manual solutions – or at least get you in that direction.
7. Understand what’s happening in the field. Pick up the phone and call 10 reps in the field.  Ask them the same set of questions that might help you get an understanding of what people are saying – what products they are interested in and where they are being squeezed on budget.  This might help you understand where to focus in the upcoming quarter and where to expect decline.  Awareness of this is the first step to knowing how much slack there is to pick up.
8. Personalize the customer experience. Try and find a really specific set of customers and focus a few messages directly to their pain points.  Even if it represents only 1% or 2% of your customer base, the exercise of creating very personal messages that are targeted to a specific audience or patient base will help guide how you want to talk to personalized segments.  More importantly, the results will be even more telling.  In most cases, especially with “ePharma Consumers” or patients looking to manage a particular disease, they will not only appreciate the personal messages more it will encourage behavior that will result in truly better management of their condition.
9. Create your conversion funnel. This is an exercise I love going through with customers: think about characteristics of your “advocates” – the people that will not only be shepherds of your product, but will at a minimum be very engaged with your communications and messages.  Next, give yourself 4 opportunities to get to a slice of approx 5,000 consumers (or whatever number is relevant to you).  The 4 opportunities can be any combination of email, web, direct mail, webinars, etc.  The key is to link them.  For example your first email directs consumers to a website, etc.  By thinking about how to move people through the customer journey and ultimately become advocates, you can get even more deliberate about how your different offers and messages link together which in turn provides the opportunity for better measurement, which, you got it, gives you the data to spend most effectively.

If you’d like to chat more about any of these, don’t hesitate to email me – ceo [at] appatureinc [dot] com.  I’d also love to hear about any other ideas or techniques that might have worked for you in reducing your spend and keeping stellar results.

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