Guest Blogger: Gareth Dunlop, MD of Tibus

Imagine you are a small business owner with 10 to 50 employees.  Your business has been growing well for nearly ten years now and is really starting to perform for you.  You were just planning a new phase of growth in the early part of 2008 when deep recession hit.  Your margins are squeezed, your people are stressed, and not only are there no bonuses this year, there are no pay-rises for any of your staff.  You are concerned that you will need to lay people off.

You check the local business press for inspiration and guidance.

What do you read?

“Keep your foot on the advertising pedal”
“Marketing through a recession”
“Investing in building your brand”

The titles have been altered to ensure that this doesn’t become personal, but the message in each is the same – that businesses should maintain or increase their marketing spend in a recession.

Really?

So given the choice of laying someone off, or reducing marketing, you should lay someone off?
Or given the choice of a direct foreign territories sales visit to close a hot lead, or continuing to market, you should market?
Or given the choice of finalising a product innovation, or continuing marketing investment, you should continue marketing?

The communications industry needs to wise up and grow up.  I have yet to read a single article by an author making these recommendations who has put a penny of their own money into implementing these recommendations for their own business.

Clearly there are many businesses who should definitely reduce communications spend.  And more importantly, there are yet more businesses who radically need to alter how their communications budget is spent, by realising that the day of the interruption marketer is gone forever, and has been replaced by the age of the permission based marketer.

And that permission based marketing happens online, in a measurable and accountable manner.

YES: If you can passionately articulate something that both you and your customers care about.  If your passion is about politics, sailing boats or saving small puppies and it corresponds with your line of business, then blogging and engaging with those like minded will enhance the likelihood of you being talked about, your influence becoming policy or donations coming in to help save more puppies.

NO: If the only thing you can blog about is what you had for breakfast or the new wallpaper in your office.  Because you want to talk doesn’t mean others want to listen.  In my experience blogging is often added to an online marketing strategy for the wrong reasons, such as to try and enhance search engine position or to fulfill the desires of the CEO.  Unless the blog integrates with the other elements of your digital marketing strategy, feeds your email marketing, your tweets and enhances the readers understanding of your topic of expertise, then it is likely  your blog will have no following.

The Merchant

I have the great privilege to work with one of the worlds leading boutique hotels; The Merchant Hotel in Belfast.  When creating their new online marketing strategy we discussed the power of using stories to help in stimulating interest and how a story spreads much better than a low room rate or an interesting menu.

When the highly ornate and modernised Victorian building opened, it could have been marketed for its high impact visual features and quirky historic artifices but that wasn’t how the marketing/conversations started.  It started around it serving the worlds most expensive cocktail.

This is marketing genius at work.  The story of opulence or history is harder to pass on and not quite as interesting.  The worlds most expensive cocktail however lets us know exactly what sort of hotel you’re talking about and of course, we’re likely to tell someone else about it.