SmallBizResource Blog -- Marketing

The Bright Side Of Marketing's Decline

Posted by Gayle Kesten Friday, Feb 20, 2009, 12:16 PM ET

Results from a survey about marketing budgets are far from pretty, but the conclusions drawn by Church of the Customer blogger Ben McConnell are downright beautiful.

Numbers aside, the latest findings from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which surveyed its members, include the words "reducing," "eliminating," and "delaying" when it comes to advertising/marketing budgets, expenditures, and hiring plans. Yet for each gloomy conclusion, McConnell turns it around with a counterpoint that favors small business. Let's take a look, with my 2 cents added, as well:

1. ANA: 87% are adding departmental travel and expense restrictions.

BM: If travel is being cut, that's good news for producers of webinars and virtual events.
GK: That's also good news for time- and budget-constrained small businesses, which will reap the benefits of a deep knowledge pool they'll be able to access online. Along the same lines, online video is an effective, easy, and inexpensive tool you can use to market your own small business.

2. ANA: 77% are reducing advertising campaign media budgets.

BM: If ad campaign media budgets are being cut, that's good news for customer loyalty evangelists whose voices are often drowned out by business development and sales.
GK: One of the many qualities small businesses have going for them is their ability to get close to their customers, to put themselves in their customers' shoes and then quickly adjust if something is less than stellar. "Loyalty comes through satisfaction," said Jonathan Rochelle, a group product manager at Google, during this month's Small Business Summit 2009.

3. ANA: 72% are reducing advertising campaign production budgets.

BM: If ad campaign production budgets are being cut, that's good news for people who manage metric-driven systems like SEO and NPS.
GK: Chances are, you're the person behind your Web site's search engine optimization efforts and are already ahead of the pack in terms of know-how. Otherwise, SEO God knows, the Internet is replete with resources that will teach you most everything you need to know to attract search engines' attention. NPS? Honestly, that's a new one to me. It stands for Net Promoter Score, and it's a way to measure customer satisfaction based on the chances they'll recommend your company to a friend based on a 10-point scale. (Hats off to Onward Search's Reilly O'Connell for the pointer.)

4. ANA: 68% are challenging agencies to reduce internal expenses and/or identify cost reductions.

BM: If agencies are being forced to reduce internal expenses, that's good news for companies that make inexpensive project management or collaboration software.
GK: Small businesses know who those companies are because we've been using their products for ages. Tools like Box.net, eXpresso, Zoos and Zoho, Clarizen -- some of which are free and all of which are wallet-friendly.

5. ANA: 48% are looking to reduce agency compensation

BM: If agency compensation is being cut, that's good news for start-up agencies that don't have the overhead of existing ones, or agencies that haven't had the impetus to reinvent themselves using a social media lens rather than a broadcast media lens
GK: Score one for those start-ups that begin life lean and mean, and don't take Fridays off during the summer. (Do big agencies really still do that?) Small businesses have also caught onto the trend of leveraging social media tools as a smart way to market themselves, network with peers (old and new), and establish themselves as a thought leader.

Marketing