Budget-Schmudget: Things to do when the faucet’s turned off

I know, I know.

A recession - or a crypto-recession, or whatever it is we’ve got going on here - is not the time to stop spending on marketing.

But we all know how budgets work, especially marketing budgets, especially in small companies.

A few deals get canceled or pushed out a quarter or two. Cash flow isn’t quite flowing the way you’d like it to. Nobody wants to start issuing pink slips. Hmmmmm, where is there some discretionary spending going on. Aha! Marketing!

And so, Ms. VP of Marketing, Mr. Director of Programs, you may get asked - make that told - to stop spending.

So, now’s the time to focus on things you should be doing, but maybe haven’t gotten around to:

• Talk to your customers: Most of us marketing people really and truly want to get to know our customers, but half the time, we only get around to contacting them when we want something: a customer success story; a press reference; participation in a webinar. Now’s the perfect time to check in for no good reason, to ask your customers how they’re doing, and how - in their eyes - you’re doing. A few friendly phone calls may even yield a relationship that does result in a customer profile. Speaking of which:
• Update your collateral:  The beauty of the online world is that you probably don’t have closets crammed with cartons of old brochures. Which is not to say that your pdf’s couldn’t stand an update. Don’t worry about wholesale rewrites or re-design, which can be costly: focus on what’s changed in the market and the product since all of your pieces were created. If you do have old customer profiles, see if you can refresh them reflect new features in the product, or whether there’s something new to say about how the customer is using it.(And, while you’re at it, if you used a customer’s name and title, make sure that they’re still with the company, and that the title is accurate, etc.)
• Tackle that research project: If you don’t have a dedicated research function, it’s really easy to find that market and competitive research can easily find themselves at the bottom of the to-do list. So start wandering around - from analyst - to competitor - to blogger - to online press - to things that seem completely silly and irrelevant. You never know what you’ll find. But don’t let the wandering be idle: If you start out with a template - here are the things I want to learn - you’ll be more purposeful and come away from your research session with some blanks filled in - rather than drawing a complete bank. (What did I just spend the last four hours doing?) Download or pdf-print anything that looks interesting, saving the long stuff for a relaxed read-through later. Concentrate on finding the gems.
• Hang out in the blogosphere:  Even if your company isn’t blogging, there are no doubt forums out there that speak to your industry, market, technology, etc. Start reading - and start commenting. You never know where it will lead. (Just make sure not to act like a jerk by inserting direct pitches in your comments - indirect will do just fine - let alone let yourself get dragged into sniping matches. If someone is making incorrect statements about your company or products, by all means offer a correction. Just don’t let it get ugly, or take it personally.)
• Clean out the marketing closet:  Those cool tee-shirts from the Great Product Launch of Ought-Four can go to a homeless shelter. Those outdated brochures and white papers - what were you thinking when you ordered so many - can get recycled. Anything that’s really dated or truly lame: get rid of it. If you think there’s some stuff that someone would actually use, set up a table outside the lunchroom or caf and let people shop ’til they drop.
• Keep in touch with prospects:  Keep in mind that no budget is no excuse for ignoring prospects. Maybe you won’t be doing  the fancy webinar with the fancy-pants analyst you were planning for Q4, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to keep in appropriate contact with the folks in the pipeline, and keep providing your sales people with relevant reasons to contact. Maybe it’s just an article you saw on industry trends that you want to share. Or a product update.
• Do something fun with your team: Have an onsite-offsite with a particular focus for a joint project. Maybe its a competitive info sharing session, where everyone on the team is asked to brush up on one competitor. Maybe it’s a product education day, where you make sure that everyone’s got baseline knowledge on what you do. Maybe it’s creating an FAQ. Maybe it’s taking each piece of collateral you have and boiling it down to 25 words - or 10. Okay, no budget problem means no Seth Godin, but there’s a lot of learning and mentoring you can do with the resources you have in-house. (Or, if you’re in Boston, give me a shout: I can come hang out with you and your team for half a day for next to nothing. I guarantee that we’ll have fun and learn something in the process.)

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