Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Seven ways to boost your marketing or BD that won’t cost you anything when things are quiet.


When things are quiet you don’t need to spend precious cash on expensive promotional projects designed to make the phone ring again. There are some basic business development and marketing projects you can do which are as close to free as possible. The only thing stopping you… is you. 

A mistake some professional businesses seem to make when thinking about their marketing or business development activity is to equate this with spending money they don’t have. Hence they do nothing. Investing money in a strategic BD or marketing strategy makes sense provided it’s part of a long term strategy, with key outcomes in mind. Activity should never be confused with outcomes.

But by the same token, there are plenty of things you can do yourself without spending money on reactionary short term projects which just spin the wheels and chew up cash. Here are seven suggestions for starters:
  1. Freshen up your database. How long since you took a close look at your database of clients and prospective clients? If you aren’t in the habit of sending out regular material to them, there is a very good chance this could be substantially out of date. People change jobs. Companies merge or close. The business world is changing fast and if your contact list hasn’t been used for more than a year, you may be surprised at how many obvious updates are needed. Think also about how many additions should be there, but aren’t. It costs next to nothing to sit down with a coffee or two and diligently go through your contacts one by one. This can also help prompt you to call people you haven’t spoken to for a while, which is always a good idea. 
  2. Revisit your e-news. Or start one! If you have a regular or semi-regular e-news, coming up with a fresh design and layout costs next to nothing and can bring your attention to out of date designs. If you don’t already have a regular e-news, invest some time in coming up with one. I’ve used the Mailchimp service for some years now. My cost is only US $30 a month but if your lists are less than 1,000 it’s free. You can use their templates and upload databases and it’s all quite professional – and costs next to nothing. A significant number of very large organisations use Mailchimp in Australia so don’t be fooled into thinking that you need some costly bespoke provider service which is hard to understand and even harder to use. 
  3. Write some content. Content is king. And the best content you can create involves your insights into ways you can save your clients time, or money, or stress or complication, or how you can add value, increase returns or identify new opportunities. What you might think is taken for granted within your own business is probably something your clients need you for. Sharing these insights, in a simple jargon-free way, is marketing and BD ‘gold.’
  4. Revisit your website. How long since you even looked at your own site in the way clients do? I visited one recently which clearly hadn’t been upgraded since a burst of activity in 2012. There were a host of ‘news’ pieces from that year (I am guessing when it was launched)… then nothing.  Recent projects hadn’t been updated, probably because the design was unwieldy and not user-friendly. Updating content should be simple. These days it should also be free. I’ve designed basic websites using the Wix templates, which make design easy and updating even easier. Another is called Squarespace. You can do this yourself on a weekend, it really is that easy. If you already own a domain, it can be easily transferred across to anything new you might design. Some web design and PR companies hate this sort of thing because it renders them largely redundant for small-medium sized businesses. 
  5. Survey your clients. Understanding how your clients see you, and what services they value most is important information. It helps shape and inform the way you deal with the market, it tells you what messages will resonate best, and what advantages you may have over competitors, among other things. Plus, it shows you’re interested in what they think. Surveying can be as complicated and costly as you want to make it, but in my experience, the simplest of questions deliver the greatest value: it’s the Occam’s razor principle. A very popular surveying website is Surveymonkey and yes, it’s free, it’s easy to use and gives you useful results. You can do this yourself, provided you follow some basic rules of survey design and language. 
  6. Rewrite your ‘standard’ submissions. We all get lazy with submissions and frequently resort to the ‘copy/paste’ syndrome of assembling proposals, bids or tenders, especially when time is short. But when things are quiet, it’s an ideal time to pull out some recent submissions and rethink them from the ground up. Have a close look at how you write your executive summaries. Are they summaries or just some rambling introductory narrative? How many standard sections of narrative sound dull, or sound like they could have come from any of your competitors? Can you make them much more about how your business relates to your clients? Can they be punchier? Can you replace long sections of narrative with simple illustrations? Refreshing this content costs nothing and relies only on your efforts and abilities. 
  7. Refresh, rewrite and redesign your capability statements. If you’re relying on just one generic capability outline, and if this is more than 12 months old, this should be a priority. Are projects up to date? Are client lists current? Staff profiles up to date? And if you have a number of strategic target industry sectors, have you prepared customised capabilities targeting the hot buttons and identifying your skill sets for these sectors? These sort of documents are easily produced in house these days, with relatively little time or effort. Distributing them as pdfs is a next to no cost initiative which simply requires your time and attention.

This might sound like I’m talking myself out of a job but these basic seven suggestions are often the sort of thing that rely more on the business owner than any consultant can provide. It’s your IP and your insights and your market knowledge that needs to be applied. You just need to find the time to do so, and there’s no better time than when things are quiet to get on top of these simple initiatives.