Marketing in a Slow Market

As many small businesses find ways to trim the fat, many are mistakenly putting less budget and energy towards marketing. Instead of cutting marketing, revamping your marketing strategy would be a wise move. There are four vital steps that a business owner must take in order to endure these times.

1. Assess Your Customer's Behavior. Just as you are making adjustments to your business, no doubt your customers are as well. You need to figure out how these tighter budgets and perceptions of the importance of your offering and services affect the business that they conduct with you. Small business owners will need to adapt what and how we sell so as to meet the customer's needs as they emerge.
   
2. Measure ROI. All advertising designed for branding or image awareness is not appropriate in this economy. Are your campaigns specifically designed to drive customers to use your services? Each step in the marketing chain must lead to a measureable response and ultimately a sale of your product or service. Always ask your customers how they heard about you.
3. Market to Current Customers. Consumers, including your customers, are being a bit more careful about how they spend their money and look for companies that they know and trust. Remember it is more costly to find new customers than to maintain the ones that you have. Regularly reach out to customers through use of some sort of customer relationship management too. Vary your tactics, but stay top of mind without wearing out your welcome.
   
4. Emphasize price promotions versus price cuts. As consumers are looking for ways to save money, they are more inclined to use coupons. This is a strong indicator of the trend towards price-specific promotion. Avoid full-scale price cutting, after all you still need to service as a business owner yourself. Short terms promotions will stimulate sales from current customers and draw in new ones.

Surviving a Recession With a Virtual Assistant

Through the various media outlets, and more importantly, via our bottom lines, we find mounting concern about the economy and see the affects of a recession. In fact, according to a January 27, 2008 article entitled, Small Business Planning for Slump written by Jim Wyss of the Miami Herald.com; "Among a dozen small business owners interviewed last week, most said they expect things to get worse before they get better -- and many doubted the new economic stimulus package, which includes rebates for consumers and tax breaks on business expenses, will do much for their bottom line." Then what will help small businesses in this economic slump? How can small business take on this challenge when every indicator says that they should be saving money rather than spending it?

One such way is to outsource administrative responsibilities to a Virtual Assistant. Virtual Assistants are independent entrepreneurs who provide creative long-term collaborative and professional administrative support to their clients. Virtual Assistants are paid only for the time spent on tasks and utilize time-tracking software that records such information. Therefore, a client is not charged for downtime, breaks or distractions that may occur during the day.

You may be thinking, "This sounds good, but what about the costs?" Well, if you compare the compensation rate of a highly skilled Virtual Assistant to how much it would cost you to hire a full time staffer, or even a temp; paying taxes, benefits and other associated expenses, you will immediately see the cost savings.

Click here for a cost comparision of employees versus Virtual Assistants.