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Clay has more than 10 years experience in consumer product and services management, new product development, and technology. He is a principal at Spring Creek Group, a results-oriented marketing services firm focused on delivering measurable marketing success for its clients via emerging online channels.

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Marketing on the Chopping Block: Tips for Survival

Written on
Nov 14, 2008 
Author
Clay McDaniel  |
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Marketing on the Chopping Block: Tips for Survival



adfutures_smaller.jpgADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Global financial markets are in a fluctuating wildly, rumors of cutbacks and layoffs are hitting every sector and every industry. Marketing budgets, already stretched thin, may soon be cut back even further. As a marketer what can you do to avoid the chopping block?
1. Become Indispensable
Sometimes clichés ring true, and at the moment, being indispensable at your job is paramount to keeping it. Instead of just showing up and “doing your job”, think of your primary responsibility as “driving your brand”. This means potentially taking some risks and initiative – to drive creative thinking and to challenge some of your company’s conventional wisdom. First, you need to think of new ideas that go beyond traditional marketing. Social media campaigns? Mobile promotions? New web-based, cross-campaign measurement techniques? Then, you have to successfully convince your team that one or more of your new ideas merits implementation.
After you’ve devised a new strategy, YOU should take the responsibility to build, drive, and manage the program. Find competitor case studies that prove your ideas work. At the very least, now you’re driving more value because you’re managing a new, innovative, potentially valuable program for your company. Then, if your new program starts to demonstrate clear business value and boosts marketing ROI, you really become indispensable. In other words, if you devise a new marketing strategy that works, your boss will be more likely to keep you around to keep running it – and to come up with other new, successful ideas.
2. Provide the Data
Measuring success online and offline should be a no-brainer, but it often isn’t. In an October 2008 study from McKinsey, 80% of marketers surveyed said they only used qualitative measures, or their own subjective judgments, to figure out if online campaigns were working. That means only 20% of marketers use quantitative, analytical techniques to measure and optimize their online marketing programs! In today’s economic climate, you need to “measure it to manage it.”
In fact, if you want to impress management with your fantastic marketing skills, you need to make sure you’re using the most up-to-date tools (and there are some great free, or very inexpensive, Web-based brand analysis and campaign measurement tools) to measure as much as you can – individual campaign effectiveness, multi-channel metrics, overall ROI, and more. The more important, more visible, and more trusted the data – and the degree to which you personally are responsible for and knowledgeable about that data – the more likely you are to be associated with marketing success at your company.
When thinking about what to measure, go beyond just site traffic and ad impression figures. You can use new Web tools to measure not only your brand’s buzz, but also brand sentiment, across blogs and social networks – and that type of metric is hugely valuable in a down economy when brands and consumer opinions are going to rise in importance. And, remember, even if it’s a new metric, always put it in perspective; any number is only as good as its trend line or comparables.
3. Be an Innovator
If you want to stick around your marketing department, start thinking like an innovator. Marketing innovation comes in two flavors: doing your job in new, more efficient and effective ways; or doing new things by using your smarts, initiative, research and strategic planning. Both innovation tactics only work if your new proposals or new way of working are in line with your company’s overall marketing and sales goals. (Innovation for innovation’s sake is just puffery.)
The first tactic is lower-risk and usually works to elevate your status among peers when you demonstrate a track record of “faster, better, cheaper”. But the latter is where the real opportunities exist to create transformational brand and marketing impact for your company – and in the process cement your value, reputation, and role within your company. It’s not easy to come up with entirely new ideas and strategies; it requires new and creative thinking about strategies, channels, and tactics. The good news is there are many emerging marketing and brand-awareness opportunities with the continued explosion in social, word of mouth, and community-enabled marketing.
Many social marketing initiatives don’t even require incremental media-buying or an increase in creative development budgets Here are just a few low-cost ideas to consider: building social network brand advocacy (Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, Orkut, and others); posting video content your company has rights to already on sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Revver and MetaCafe; distributing brand-related images and digital photography on sites like Flickr; hosting product or service-related “Question and Answer” forums on sites such as Live Search QnA and Yahoo! Answers; supplying and managing local listings on directory sites like Yelp, Citysearch; Yahoo! Local, Google Local, and Live Search Business Mapping.
And you can go a lot farther, even on a limited budget. How about a website that allows customers to talk to one another and share their impressions of your products, ask real-time questions to experts in the field in which your brand operates (such as nutritionists or fashion designers), and take interactive courses related to your products or services? It’s fun to think of new social marketing ideas like this. New free or low-cost software and web ites are coming online to enable more direct consumer engagement every day.
Assuming you don’t magically become more efficient overnight at your “everyday job”, then yes, you’re going to have to put in a few more hours to show your marketing mettle. But your rewards will likely be two-fold: career development and job security.





Reader Comments.

Great tips for marketers looking to stay employed in a down economy. Some other things I might add are:

1) Don’t be shy. communicate your results and communicate often. Let people see your accomplishments and take notice.

2) Consider blogging – show managers how blogging can drive web site traffic with little financial investment.

3) Make comments to other blogs. Include company contact information. Record the results and report on them periodically. It’s an innovative approach. The results are well documented but few companies engage in this practice.

John P. Kreiss
MorganSullivan, inc.
Business Solutions in Real Estate and Construction
http://www.morgansullivan.com

Posted by John P. Kreiss | 1:01 pm on November 17, 2008.

Great tips for marketers looking to stay employed in a down economy. Some other things I might add are:

1) Don’t be shy. communicate your results and communicate often. Let people see your accomplishments and take notice.

2) Consider blogging – show managers how blogging can drive web site traffic with little financial investment.

3) Make comments to other blogs. Include company contact information. Record the results and report on them periodically. It’s an innovative approach. The results are well documented but few companies engage in this practice.

Posted by John P. Kreiss | 1:02 pm on November 17, 2008.

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