What do most small business owners do when faced with a recession?
What do they do when buyers are fewer and far between?

Earlier this week I blogged about how to grow your business when times are tough and I know that your instincts may be to do the wrong thing.

The natural tendency is to get scared and cut back on your marketing and hope that the downturn is short lived and you have cash to spend when business picks up.

Is this the right strategy? Is running scared the prudent path to higher profits?

For most businesses, running scared during a market downturn will only guarantee that they will come out at the bottom, when and if the market ever picks up. Builders are a great example.

When it was easy to get a mortgage, builders had buyers lined up ten deep at their door. All they needed was a business card and a yellow page listing to get all the clients they could handle. Here in Connecticut, unless you wanted to build a house of over 6,000 square feet you couldn’t even get a builder to return your calls.

After ten or more years of easy money, the lending landscape has changed and any builder who thinks that waiting this out is the right solution will be out of business in a few years. It could easily be another ten years before interest rates peak and come down stimulating the next building boom.

I know you’re smarter than to think you can just wait out this recession. Smart business owners see recessions as the chance get ahead while others are running scared.

How can you prosper in this recession?
Use this proven small business marketing strategy >>

Even in a downturn you can always find more business than you can handle if you know how to market your business. The real estate market is a good example.

One real estate broker called me from Atlanta where prices are down 7% and monthly sales are down by 20%. Instead of crying about spilt milk or running scared he saw this downturn as a great chance to end up making more.

His reasoning was that, while sales were down, 3,564 homes sold in April. With an average commission of $10,000 all he needed to do was instead of just selling one, sell three per month and he’d be making plenty.

Tough times can be great for business because they winnow out the less than savvy marketers and leave the playing field wide-open for smart people like you. Fewer competitors + smarter marketing = more business for you!

If you act scared or market defensively - you’ll see your sales and profits plummet - and they may never recover.

Instead use your marketing to position yourself as the go to expert, continue to build strong relationships with prospects and generate referrals - you’ll prosper even in this recession and when the economy picks up you’ll find yourself ahead of your competitors.

The choice is yours.

Find out the simple marketing solution I used to make the past six months of this recession my best ever >>

To Your Success,

Charlie
Proven Small Business Marketing Ideas

Listen to the podcast of this blog online with this link >>

Were your sales stagnant last year? How was the first quarter of 2008?

What’s the problem? Is it the economy?

With all the news about the mortgage meltdown, sinking real estate values, rising unemployment and warnings of a recession, it’s easy to feel anxious and pessimistic. But don’t assume that your slow sales can be blamed on a faltering economy.

It’s true that banks are tight about lending and your customers are cautious about spending, but that doesn’t mean you can’t continue to grow your business.

There are profits to be made in any almost all economy, even in areas you’d think would be the hardest hit.

During the last week of March I took a vacation with my son in British Columbia to check out Revelstoke, a new Canadian ski resort. At a time when real estate values are sinking, the economy is slumping and the ski industry is stagnating, someone had the audacity to open a new ski resort.

And even crazier, the proposed resort isn’t anywhere near a population center. It’s at least a five-hour drive from the airports in Vancouver or Calgary. For many U.S. and Canadian residents, it’s more or less inaccessible. It took us over 18 hours to get there from Connecticut.

As you drive up the recently graded dirt road to the mountain, you see no condos, no golf course, and no model ski homes. Other than some amazing ski terrain and two new lifts, the place is more mud and vision than reality. (We went cat skiing but here’s a video of heli skiing)

So what happened when they put their first real estate offering on the market?

It sold out in 2 hours!
How? With some great marketing!

What’s the secret to creating a huge demand and successful sales campaigns?

I’d hired a driver to get us home from our return flight in the middle of the night. On the way, our driver told us that his business was down by over 50% from last year. The following day, I talked to another limo service that was growing steadily at 10% each month.

The big question is,

Is the economy to blame, or is it your marketing?

Conventional wisdom has it that your sales will fall off in a down economy, but that will be true only if you let it happen.

One of my clients came to me for coaching after laying off all his employees as a result of sinking sales last year. We retooled his marketing plan and wrote a new marketing message. One month later, he told he he’d never brought in so much new business in such a short period of time in the eight years since he’d opened for business.

Ready to see your sales take off even in a down economy? Use this simple strategy? >>

If you’re using the economy as an excuse for not growing your business this year, think again. Sure, it’s easier to grow a business when money is plentiful. But when spending shrinks, the truly successful separate themselves from their peers and keep their businesses growing.

These people are leaders who see even the most challenging situation as a problem to solve. They look for answers and then take action. If you’re a leader, you can make your business more successful in almost any type of economy by getting the knowledge you need to grow your business.

Others look for someone or something else to blame for their problems or misfortune. “Blamers’ let themselves get stuck. Blaming others and looking for excuses is a way to avoid fixing something that’s broken.

Are you a Leader or a Blamer?

If you’re leader who wants to put your business on the fast track to success - take action and find out what works >>

Introducing More Business podcasts.
To listen to the podcast online, use this link >>

- Charlie
Marketing Strategies That Get… Results

Have you noticed a chill in the air this December, in the weather and in your sales?

Use this small business marketing strategy to turn things around.

According to my Toronto based bookkeeper, this winter is forecast to be one of the coldest and snowiest of the last 15 years. That cold Canadian air seems to be spreading.

Here in New England, the bears are hibernating and so are many consumers. The financial sections of the paper have been forecasting lower levels of consumer spending all month, and debating whether or not we’re in a recession.

Has this affected your business? What should you do?

Marketing your business in an environment where your target market is spending less doesn’t make life any easier, but there is still plenty of money to be made. You can’t afford to hibernate, though, and just wait out the cold season.

One of my clients brokers construction loans. Over a year ago, when loans were still flying out the door, Ron decided to phase out his loan brokerage and specialize further in a market he knows well. He built a web site that generates leads for construction loans to firms all across the U.S.

By this past fall, when housing starts dropped precipitously, Ron had his new web site up and running. Even though the overall volume of construction loans was down, he now has a national reach instead of a local one, and has plenty of business - and income coming in.

How can you weather a bear market or a recession? Use this link to find out >>

Whatever else you do, don’t let pessimism get the best of you. There is opportunity in every market environment, but you’ll need a plan to take advantage of it. Here are two simple ideas you can use.

Market To A Larger Audience
One of the easiest ways to keep growing your business, even in a time of reduced spending, is to do what Ron did and market to a wider audience. If 20% fewer people in your target market are buying, but you’re marketing to twice as many people, your income could still go up by more than 50%.

A no-cost or low-cost way to do this is by join venture partnerships. Find a business that markets to your target market and get them to promote your products or services in return for your doing the same for them. Or work out a profit-sharing deal. [is this correct?]

Increase Your Conversion Rates
Do you wish you could generate more leads, close more sales and sell more to each client? What are you doing about it?

Let’s take a look at the four generic steps of website marketing:
1. Use a Google Ad to bring people to your web site
2. Generate a lead
3. Make a sale
4. Get clients to buy again.

What are your conversion rates for each of these steps?

Most web sites get dismal results from this process. If you own a typical website, only a fraction of a percent of site visitors contact you and an even smaller fraction buy from you.

Want to increase your online conversion rates and sales? Use this link >>

Increasing your conversion rates is a step-by-step process. I advised one client to make the changes below and she saw more than a tenfold increase in sales.
a. Rewrite the copy of your homepage to focus on the problem you solve for prospects.
b. Offer a freebie that your prospects can’t resist to get them to contact you.
c. Measure the conversion rate of each page on your site. Tune up each of the high-traffic pages so they convert visitors to leads and sales.
d. Set up a system of autoresponders to prompt your prospects to take the next step in your marketing sequence.

If your web site generated ten times as many leads, and your followup process converted twice as many of those leads into sales, how much more could you make, even in an economic slowdown?

Don’t let the talk of bear markets send you crawling into a cave or you’ll lose the interest of all your potential clients. Instead, implement a marketing strategy to grow your business all year long.

Interested in growing your business? Use this link >>

Charlie
Marketing Ideas That Make You Money