Good or Bad Business Year — You Choose

I know…the economy is making a giant sucking sound.  But you have a choice around that.  You can choose to listen to that sound and possibly get sucked in.  Or not.

I’ve been listening, reading and watching the news and noticing that everyone is functioning on a rather large assumption — we don’t have a lot of choices and the choices we have are not pretty, easy or fun.  But the truth is that we DO have choices.  All of us have choices.  And having choice means having control.

Fear and anxiety are paralyzing and they come from not having information and/or control.  There is an easy way to fix that.  Get information.  Choose to control your destiny.

Now, I’m not saying that this will be a pleasant or fun process.  But choosing to do something is a completely different feeling that being FORCED to do something.

So first — let’s get some information.

Search Engine Land: Has a wonderful article about using Pay Per Click advertising in this economy.  I’ve just dabbled it some Adwords myself and have found the experiment very rewarding.  The key to success here is really understanding your customers, what they want and what will motivate them.  You’ll waste your budget if you don’t get that right.

Small Business Trends has a FABULOUS Research section on their site.  Can I just say I can’t believe this stuff is FREE. Here are some examples:

• Small Business will spend more on advertising in 2009
• Most small Businesses aren’t following up on Sales leads! This is yet another example of people crying in their soup and not doing the obvious.
• Small Businesses Fail to Invest in Search Marketing.  This study from Kiplinger says small businesses are online – but haven’t taken the next step – investing search marketing.  Gotta do it all.

That’s just a sampling of sites – and at  the risk of being just a little too biased – trend and research information from Small Business Trends is where I go EVERYDAY for information.

You get the point here.  First get information – then start thinking about the different ways that you can use that information to grow your customer base and your business.

Here is a general list of the things that you can choose around your marketing strategy:

Your Name/Tagline/Image/Logo: If you thought you were stuck with those, think again.  While I wouldn’t recommend CHANGING these – an update may be in order.  The world has made some radical shifts and living under an image or message from the past doesn’t do you any favors.  Check out HP’s new tool MarketSplash for ideas.

Your Offering: Wendy’s has tweaked their offering and called it “3-conomics” They’ve taken a traditional $.99 cent value menu and made it relevant.  Remember your offering is the combination of your product, service, price and distribution — as well as communication.  All of those can be tweaked and changed to make them easier to pick by your customers.

So you see – you’re the one with all the control.  All your customer controls is who they choose – you get to choose everything else.