There are two places businesses look when belt-tightening is deemed necessary: staff and the marketing budget. As you can guess, trimming your marketing budget will more than likely do the same to your sales. The best course of action is to re-evaluate your marketing strategy and examine what’s been working and what hasn’t.

Now more than ever it’s important to stay in the public eye. Investigate popular, low-cost / high-return marketing tactics to beef up your advertising efforts without having to scale back your expectations. Show that you have the ability and aptitude to weather a storm that many won’t be able to.

Here are some key techniques that will allow you to build a trusting relationship with both your existing and future clients while holding your marketing budget at bay:

Leverage Free Media – Social Networking, Blogs

Twitter

Unless you’ve spent the past seven years of your life under a rock, you’ve probably heard of social networking giants ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’. Twitter is a pioneer of microblogging; a way for users to keep others informed of their current status. Countless companies (e.g., Dell, H&R Block, Comcast, Kodak, etc.) make use of Twitter to do everything - from providing customer service to gaining consumer feedback and burnishing their brands.

Positive interface from a customer on a company’s Twitter account could translate to increased consumer interest and dedication. Most recently Barack Obama used Twitter to his advantage by gaining over 170,000 followers (we all know how that turned out). It’s a quick and easy way to keep your business’ name out there and keep you contemporary (even “hip”) at the same time.

Facebook

Conversion, on the other hand, is the name of the game when advertising on Facebook. Facebook allows you to target prospects based on personal criteria, permitting you to more effectively and efficiently spend your marketing time and funds. If a Facebook user is single, you can present him or her with a dating ad. If a user has filled out a Facebook-quiz regarding favorite fast-food restaurants, you could show them a weight-loss ad. If the user is married, you can present them with ads regarding family vacations. Like Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites are the current rage. It’s relatively inexpensive with little risk to your recession impacted budget.

Make the Most of Your Customers

Monetizing After-the-fact

There are countless tried and true ways to monetize your existing and future sales. Take advantage of the opportunity to confirm and thank a sale via telephone or email and use this time to up/cross sell other associated products. Besides the obvious prospect of making additional sales by up-selling products, services or add-ons; your customers will feel the consideration of focused and specialized attention from a retailer. This will translate into future sales, customer repeats and positive word-of-mouth.

Internet retailers should consider adding pop-up boxes to their sites in order to capture shopping cart abandons. “Before you go…” pop-ups will give customers a chance to reconsider their choice to leave the site and even offer an opportunity to take advantage of discount offers.

A Well Oiled Engine

Harness the power of Search Engine Marketing

The science of making your website visible in the organic (“free”) listings on major search engines like Google and Yahoo! is an ever-evolving discipline that demands constant vigilance, cutting-edge strategies and acute attention to detail. The SEO (Search-Engine-Optimization) team at DMi offers a progressive and multi-faceted approach to search engine marketing that will maximize your chances of top placement when users search for your services or products.

By determining the keywords that drive quality traffic to your site, attracting links to your site from other relevant pages and developing relevant content that will improve your rankings while adding to the user experience; DMi has both the tools and talent to greatly enhance your web presence and add to your bottom line.

Email Frenzy

It’s important to value your clients, but more important for your clients to feel valued. When deciding on where to spend their hard earned dollars, customers will always go with the business that made them feel appreciated. So, make the most of sales you’ve already made. Take time to organize and assess your existing clientele data, then build your own internal email list. Remember - every time your customer needs to purchase an item that you supply, do whatever it takes to be the first place they think of.

Purchases and Non-Purchases – You may already know more about your customer base than you realize.

You can reignite your customers’ interest (and subsequently spark sales) by starting email “drip campaigns*” based on previously established client purchase preferences to alert them of specials, discounts and various promotions. If the email content is specific or related to items that your customers have already shown interest in, the customer will be more likely to make additional purchases and feel like you’ve taken time to consider and appreciate what their interests are.

[ * “Drip” campaigns are a form of email marketing where a company sends emails to subscribers over a period of time on a scheduled basis. DMi Partners’ Email Marketing Division specializes in determining the best drip strategy while optimizing content to ensure the mailing is not marked as SPAM.]

When compiling or refining your clientele data, carefully review your customer’s likes and dislikes (send out a survey if necessary) and subsequently mold your email content to target their criteria. That way, you’ll appeal to the things they’re most likely to spend money on. It’s also a simple and effective way to keep your brand at the forefront of a client’s mind and inbox.

There is also value in existing data that may not have resulted in a sale. Recapture those shopping cart abandons by reviewing your customers’ selections, and deliver an email that offers similar items. As customers scour the marketplace, desperate to find the best deals possible, any email based on an abandoned sale should be ‘price-focused’. You should offer ‘price match-or-slash guarantees’. The idea here is to feed your customers a steady stream of excuses to come back and resume shopping.

Consider Your Contract

Fine-Print

Changing times means changing terms. Favorable contract terms are easier to obtain in a down economy – keep this in mind when agreeing on conditions. As advertisers assume the upper hand in negotiating media, make sure any contract you sign reflects the market. Push to have out-clauses or minimums added to your deals. Again, these techniques will dramatically limit both your risk and exposure while running tests to find the most effective advertising methods.

Performance is key

Another way to make sure you’re getting the most out of your marketing budget is to ask about marketing on a rev share or CPA basis. Splitting revenue or basing compensation on performance will lessen the financial risk you will have to assume. As The Performance Marketing Agency, DMi Partners has several offerings that are pay-per-performance based. DMi’s unique blend of agency services and performance marketing strategies offer their clients the opportunity to leverage the most up-to-date digital marketing techniques in a direct response environment. In doing so, you have simultaneous access to the best in class services of a premier digital agency and the shared-risk and cost-effective accountability of performance-based marketing.

Measure Your Marketing

Track and Analyze

Trimming your budget isn’t always a bad idea as long as you’re only cutting the fat. Ensure proper performance tracking systems are in place to monitor your marketing efforts. Analyze the data and get rid of what doesn’t work and keep what does. This way you’ll tone your business muscle while saving money on extraneous and poorly performing promotions.

Make sure that these systems track the sales progress as well. Consider key components that may be missing in your virtual sales progression. Since human interaction is a non-entity in online sales, work to make your site optimum and designed to sell. Take advantage of Google Analytics to make informed decisions about the design and operation of your site. Besides being free, it’s one of the best ways (if not the best) to examine where your traffic came from and where it ends up.

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Ignoring the vast financial difficulties our country is facing would be a mistake of irreversible proportions. However, if you focus on a grass roots marketing campaign and free to low-cost online advertising support you’ll fair much better than your competitors and find the storm of this recession to be nothing more than a mere sun shower. Don’t let competitors swoop in and gobble up your sales; use these tips and market the smart way.