The C-Suite Digital Handbook

Five Reasons Why This is the Best of Times: You Can Do More with Less – Part 1

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These economically trying times have me twisting Charles Dickens’ famous opening line from A Tale of Two Cities.  It is the worst of times, but it is also the best of times. Why this schizophrenic cheery optimism you might ask?

You can do more with less! Continuing advances in technology provide businesses with many tools and processes that can reduce costs and build revenues.  And best yet, they simply enhance what businesses have always done – get customers, engage them and drive transactions.  So, while CNBC, The Wall Street Journal and other business media outlets will continue to report on how tough times are, this blog is dedicated to focusing on why this is the best of times.

First of all, you can find encouragement in history. In June 2009, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation released a study, which found that over half of the companies in the 2009 Fortune 500 List were launched during a recession or bear market, as well as almmost half of the firms on the 2008 Inc. List of the Fastest Growing Companies.  Also during tought times, innovative and enterprising companies gain traction and flourish.  For example, in the 2001 – 2003 recession, Apple launched the iPod, Google became the dominant search engine, Amazon established itself as the leading online retailer and LinkedIn was founded.

Second, recruit your employees to market your business in their day-to-day activities. Marketing budgets are always amongst the first to be cut in down times.  In the past, reduced marketing budgets posed real challenges for companies without strong brand recognition when recovery transpired.  Today you can respond to these cuts by engaging everyone in marketing through his or her daily routines.  How?  Every day your employees are communicating by email to many points (sending and receiving more than 156 emails a day according to The Radicati Group).  This stream of communication is a marketing opportunity.  Here are some ideas, recognizing that some of these may already be practiced by your company:

• Template everyone’s email with your logo, a marketing tagline and link to your website
• If there is a company blog, include a link to the blog as well
• Invite your stakeholders (customers, vendors, advisors, etal.) to participate in a survey about your products and services like RatePoint and Constant Contact
• Tag the bottom of emails with special promotions that can drive revenues
• Experiment and see what works and best drives revenues.  Just make sure that you don’t overload emails with too many bells and whistles that your employees’ emails wind up in junk email folders!

Third, you can engage with your customers directly and regularly. Traditional media historically has been the most efficient vehicle for communicating about your company.  Newspapers, magazines, radio and television worked as the “broad”-cast your message to your targeted audience.  As someone who has worked in the traditional media business for 20 years, these platforms still have value and best yet, can now be bought at discounted rates.  This is a time tough to reevaluate how much you are spending on these platforms and start reallocating time and resources to social media.  Social media – blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms – enable you to directly communicate with your consumers.  My colleague, David Parmet, PR and social media marketing guru, points out, “Social media are the most effective business development and communications tools ever created.”  Here are some steps for getting started:

• Spend time searching Twitter, Facebook and Blog Search to determine what is being said about your business, your competitors and your industry.  Listen and figure out ways to distinguish your company.
• Determine what social media mix to deploy by determining where your customers are in the social media universe. Try using a service like Rapleaf, which will identify what platforms your consumers are using.
• Launch the mix you pick. They are free; however, enabling them to work for you have a time cost.  Yet there are people in your organization who are already personally and professionally engaged in these platforms and can engage with your consumers.  Enlist them to be your social media ambassadors.
• Monitor how your program is going using Grader.com, a social media impact measurement tool program developed by HubSpot
• Make sure your message is consistent across social media platforms.  Tools like ping.fm enable you to syndicate the same blog post or news feed across the various social media platforms that you are utilizing.
• Subscribe to the Mashable newsletter or RSS feed and get daily updates on how other businesses are engaging with their customers using social media.  Another useful sources it TwiTip, which includes daily Twitter tips.
• Register a Facebook or Twitter account for your business, even if you don’t ultimately use it.  Someone else might go ahead and register, using your company name which can confuse potential customers in the digital universe, and potentially cost you money when you decide to use these services.

These are just some of the ways that you can do more with less and build your business.  In my next blog post, I will explore how you can cost effectively maintain ongoing research and innovation that will take your company to the next level.

I am also eager to hear about your thoughts and ideas about how to do more with less and make this time the best of times!  I look forward to your thoughts and comments.