How many "Top Ten Tips" columns have you read lately, looking for a sure-fire solution for better marketing in difficult times? Are you getting a little jaded? There's the SEO or SEM expert who says you need to spend more of your reduced budget on (what else?) search. The direct mail company that says direct is the way to spend your way out of recession. The social media guru who says this new phenomenon is the way to success. While old-line publishers say it's time to get back in touch with print!

I guess it's true: if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

There is no "one size fits all" in this environment...or any other. You need to understand how a difficult economic environment may change overall business strategy, and then make sure your marketing communications strategy is appropriately revised and aligned. Then you can revisit your budget and invest in the activities that best support the strategy.
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I’ve been in the B2B marcom business for 3 decades, always working for or with technically oriented companies. Often times I felt I was the lone voice of marketing and marketing communications.

Very early in my career, I heard retailer John Wanamaker’s famous quip -- “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know what half.” If I recall correctly it came from the mouth of a division VP/GM who was a chemist by training. He was a non-believer in the power of marcom.

For me and other members of my generation of marcom professionals the constant mention of this quote and similar ones put us on a mission. I wanted to be able to answer the questions: How much is invested? How much is wasted? I wanted to know what was working and what wasn’t. I wanted to show that the work we do contributes to the success of business.
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The economy is creeping towards a recession. The DOE’s 13 SEER mandate has helped level the playing field, household buying habits have changed dramatically since the popularity of the internet, and media options have drastically fragmented. With all of this going on, how can a low to mid level HVAC contractor compete against the big guys? While there is no perfect answer to this question, there are some suggestions to help you spend your precious marketing dollars wisely.

Start by looking to your manufacturer and distributor advertising programs. There are literally thousands of dollars available to dealers who agree to use branded and sometimes pre-packaged advertising programs. In fact some manufacturers offer up to 4 times a dealer’s advertising investment!

Next, think about timing and placement of your advertising. What are you really getting out of your investment? Case in point: if you put all of your dollars into yellow pages advertising then you
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You may be reading this after clicking on our E-news item that 45% of integrated marketers in a recent study haven’t spent marketing dollars on emerging media like social networks, blogs, or word-of-mouth initiatives, but are interested in doing so. Of course, the other side of the coin is that 55% have implemented some kind of social media effort.

Why haven’t the 45% made the plunge…or at least stuck their toe in the water?

A new study by TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony sheds some light on what we have found to be true through experience. The authors of the survey of 71 marketing professionals in the U.S., Canada, France and the U.K. say that many marketers, “particularly the slower-moving” ones (their words, not mine!), want “best practices” and “proven models.” That’s understandable,
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I’m back in the creative seat again. I volunteered to step in and head our creative staff after we agreed Jim Everhart, my predecessor, should spearhead our hyperintegration efforts.

I’m looking at things from a slightly different perspective now – a perspective of someone with a lead “creative” title and responsibilities. As I remove my account manager hat, something strikes me. We creative folks have more tools at our disposal – blogs, podcasts, email marketing, and the list goes on. Our primary function has always been to think of new and unique ways to tell our client’s story, demonstrate a benefit and craft compelling ways to reach out to a marketer’s various constituents – engineers, channel partners, integrators, other influencers and ultimately, end-users.

Sure, we still need to apply our traditional creative skills, but we now have these new, exciting tools at our disposal.
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Once you get customers to your site, make sure it’s a site you’re proud of. Keep it clean and uncluttered. First impressions are important and provide opportunities to immediately engage visitors with information that meets their needs.

Begin by providing a brief description of who you are, including the products and services that you offer, along with language that relates to the visitors need or problem. Don’t give people a reason to leave your site too early. Addressing their “pain issues” up front rather then burying them deeper in your site will encourage visitors to stay longer. Avoid industry speak, and keep your history and mission statement off the home page, reserving this valuable real estate to tell visitors how you can help them. Make the site easy to navigate and the source of relevant content that is short, simple and to the point.
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Everyone has their individual reasons as to why they measure their marketing efforts. The way I see it, we all fall into four categories: Justification of Budgets, Evaluation of Tools and Tactics, Insight into Customer Behavior, and Predicting and Projecting Results. Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we need to satisfy the most basic reason before we can move up to the more complex reason, and no matter how high you have progressed, the levels below are still extremely important. I like to call it the Hierarchy of Analytical Needs.

Here is a quick look at each of the levels.

Justification of Budgets
The lowest level of Hierarchy of Analytical Needs can best be explained with the following scenario: The CFO of your company walks into your office to discuss the need for budget cuts.
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In the lead article in the December 10 issue of B2B magazine, Kate Maddox outlined “the top 10 marketing trends for 2008, based on interviews with marketers, ad agencies, media executives, analysts and other industry experts.” Read article.

The top 10 are green marketing, globalization, the shift to online, customer in control, embracing web 2.0, improving operations, targeted and personal events, integrating media platforms, going mobile and blended search.

The marketers interviewed include top tier marketers such as Boeing, Caterpillar, FedEx, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Siemens and UPS. But what about the rest of us? (Okay, we’re an agency but we came from and still serve primarily non-top-tier B-to-B marketers. You know – the real world.)

We think the top 10 list is on target.
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When was the last time you saw a company advertise itself as “combative and adversarial?” Have you seen any vision statements that say “We struggle with our customers for common ground?” How about a tagline that says, “Committed to losing your trust?”

Of course not. But more than half of b-to-b technology companies are branding themselves this way by their actions, according to a new study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council, reported in a recent online article in B2B Magazine.

According to the study, which surveyed 1,000 b-to-b technology buyers, IT marketing and customer relationship executives and their channel partners, 56% of vendors perceive themselves as being customer-centric, but only 12% of customers agree. Even more telling is that more than half of customers surveyed described their relationship with
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Web 2.0 has presented us with a dazzling array of new communications tactics we can use to reach B-to-B audiences. It has also added an equally impressive assortment of measurement capabilities.

Where we once may have had a handful of print ads, direct mail pieces, brochures, and press releases in an integrated program, we might now have dozens of online ads, scores of Google Adwords, and an e-mail program to thousands of recipients, all segmented by interest.

And where we had 800 number phone calls and bounce-back cards returned, we now can count impressions, clicks, open rates, delivery rates, conversions, and search ratings.

It’s not an overstatement to say that we’re in danger of being overwhelmed by all the data. John Wanamaker’s desire to know “which half works” could seem even further away than ever.

But out of this concern comes a huge opportunity for marketing.
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