There Has Never Been A Better Time
Thursday 13th October 2022
There has probably never been a better time to invest in your marketing. That may seem like a flippant thing to say as a cost of living crisis starts to squeeze, but hear me out.
That investment doesn’t have to be financial. It could be time. It could be effort.
When the chips are down, most business owners’ gut instinct is to tighten their belts and try to ration their way through in the hope that they have enough in reserve to ride out the downturn. The risk here is a slow and uncomfortable fade until possible collapse. If you reduce your marketing budget and output, that fade is absolutely inevitable, and collapse is a very real possibility. If your business makes it through, it will be skin and bones on the other side and the next challenge will be to build it back up.
When many others reduce their marketing spend and subsequently their visibility in the market place, it creates space. Space for you. If consumer spending is down, there is going to be more competition for less business. You could move into that space they’ve vacated, be more visible, and be in a better position to go after their carefully considered purchases. Think about it.
Half the companies in the Fortune 500were started during a recession or a bear market (a period with a prolonged drop in investment prices when a broad market index falls by at least 20%). Read that again. That list of companies is impressive; it includes the likes of Microsoft, General Motors, FedEx and Walt Disney Company, to name just a few. If you start during an economic crisis, the only way that things are going to go is up. If you’re already established and you find yourself in one, then you have the power to choose whether your business slides slowly or powers up.
“Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.”
– Verse from Good Timber By Douglas Malloch (1922)
Marketing is unlikely to be the only expense that you are being forced to consider right now. Far from it. Running a business is a never-ending game of Sudoku in which the numbers change constantly. You’ll have your cash flow to consider. You may not have any breathing room in your budgets, or a war chest to open up. The chance would be a fine thing, for most of us. But you can box clever. Expanding into the space vacated by others who are reducing their exposure increases your chances of converting a sale. The cake that you and your competitors are vying for may be smaller, but you can go after a bigger slice.
Your mileage may vary. There are a million different products and services and each sector or industry is impacted by these crises in different ways. The you-know-what pandemic taught us all that. And when a crisis hits is the hardest time to take stock, audit activities and re-strategise. But if you can and do, you’ll stand a better chance of coming out the other side at fighting weight rather than facing the second challenge of rebuilding a business that barely made it through.
Don’t aim to simply survive. Aim to thrive.