Use consistent messaging – Everything you do and all your communications that seek to build relationships with potential customers should be consistent.  Everything related to your business sends a message to potential customers about who you are.  By carefully controlling that message, you earn trust in your ability to fill their needs.

Looks are important – Having a visually appealing website is important for making a good first impression.  Your site should also be easy to navigate, making everything as easy as possible for a customer.

Seduce with your advertising – Ads are little bits of seduction, and should be designed to make a potential customer want to learn more. Don’t count too heavily on your ads to make the sale; rely instead on your ads to get customers to make the next step. Make them alluring.

Market online – Even if they do not plan to buy online, most people go to the Internet first to research products and check out sellers. An online presence is a must-have for any business today, no matter the size or product.

Look for new opportunities – In marketing, there is always something new and better to try. Do not be adverse to taking calculated risks and look to the marketing experts to help you identify the types of opportunities that are the best fit for your product and your budget.  Change creates both risks and opportunities, but those who do not respond to either will not last long.

Marketing in tough times takes more effort and attention to the wants and needs of your target market, but when you consider the alternative – the possibility of not surviving – it’s well worth the effort.

Satisfy their emotions—Emotions play an important role in buying habits, so be sure you don’t overlook powerful emotions like security, guilt, acceptance, desire and many others, even in B2B sales.  Understand how your customer feels about what you are selling.

Don’t be too proprietary—While pride in your company and its products and/or services is a good thing, you should never forget that customers come to you for a solution to something they want or need, and are usually looking to find it on the most beneficial terms to themselves.  Do not forget why you’re in business – to serve.

Provide outstanding service—This can be the most important determining factor of why customers will choose to do business with you over your competitors.  In tough times, it is not enough to provide good service, it has to be outstanding.  Showing a customer they matter can be the most crucial factor when choosing you over someone else.

Know and overcome doubts—Doubt is a part of almost any purchase decision, and by recognizing this and confronting any doubts your customers may have directly, you give them a safe reason for doing business with you.

Consider customers your friends—Customers like to feel an emotional connection with the people and companies they do business with, so if you treat them like a friend, they are more likely to return.  That goodwill is also necessary for overcoming any bumps in the road that may occur.

And it is only through marketing that you can do all of these things.  Here are some tips for marketing in tough times:

Know your customer — To ensure you do not waste any precious resources talking to the wrong target market, you need to know who your ideal customer is – what appeals to them, what pushes their buying button, where and how they communicate.

Know what potential customers REALLY want to buy—People don’t really buy a product or service; they buy to satisfy a specific set of personal motivations.  Learn what your target market really wants – a low price? High quality? Service after the sale?

Include all influencers—Don’t neglect to include everyone who is in a position to influence the buying decision.  For example, those selling children’s products must sell to both parents and children.

Use positioning to gain share—Not only do you have to give potential customers a reason to buy what you’re selling, you must also give them reasons why they should be buying from YOU.

Make your message clear—Especially if you are selling a service, make it crystal clear exactly what you are selling and why your potential customer will benefit by purchasing from you.

Make your message interesting—Communicate your personality and your passion in your messaging so potential customers understand your story.

Make your message believable—Don’t risk making promises you cannot keep just to make a sale.  If you don’t deliver, word-of-mouth (or, these days, word online) can be harmful to your business.

Develop an annual marketing plan for the business.  Detail the goals as well as the steps necessary to achieve them. Then create processes and procedures to capture the results so you can repeat what works and eliminate what doesn’t work.

Identify major sources of leads and referrals, and develop tracking methods to measure results.  Identify the source of your referrals and leads and track the volume from each source. Then create reports for tracking the effectiveness of marketing efforts for generating leads and referrals.  Don’t waste time and money on ineffective techniques.

Develop metrics to determine ROI for each marketing program so you can determine which ones should receive the most attention.

Create an online marketing program to generate leads and prospects from the Internet.  Use a blog, online news releases and videos to drive traffic to your website.

Develop a system to create relationships with potential referral sources and for connecting with clients, prospects and referral sources on a consistent basis. This can include monthly e-newsletters, customer satisfaction surveys, etc.

Teach your staff how to use the systems you have developed.  Consistent implementation and follow-through is the key to success.  By following these guidelines, you can create a marketing system for your service business that will generate leads and referrals, allow you to convert them into new clients, who will in turn generate additional leads and referrals.

Cash flow statement so you know what cash you have on hand for expenses;

Detailed monthly sales revenues for each business category;

Detailed account of fixed expenses, including payroll, office rent, equipment, insurance, taxes, etc.;

Projected monthly revenue statement by client or product category;

New revenue forecast—potential sources of new revenue by client or product category;

Calendarized list of all marketing activities and detailed expenses for each.

Running a monthly profit and loss statement will give you an idea of how much new revenue you need to bring in to fund your business, how much should be spent on fixed expenses and marketing costs, and when you will make a profit.  It also allows you to calculate a number of different scenarios (best case, worst case, etc.) so you can plan your expenditures.

By taking a disciplined approach to your business financial plan, you will know how much cash you need to have on hand to properly fund your marketing efforts.  Each component of the marketing plan should also be scrutinized for return on investment in advance, so programs can be properly prioritized.

Financial planning is an integral part of marketing planning, because without the money to implement them, plans are only worth the time and effort it took to put them together.  By running the numbers first, you will find it much easier to make the necessary decisions on funding allocations for marketing programs.

Here are 5 tips to keeping your focus:

Focus on what you can control. You do not have control over the investment banks, global markets, or the economy.  You can only control what you are going to do to keep your business moving forward.  Speak to your employees candidly and ask them to submit at least three action items that they will undertake in the next 90 days to generate more business for your company.

Focus on improving client satisfaction. Email your customer database a client satisfaction survey.  If you are in a professional services business, ring your top 10 clients and take them to lunch.  Find ways of staying connected with your current and former clients, and ask them about the challenges they are facing and if there is something you can do to help them.

Focus on working your marketing plan. When the economy improves, you will find some companies have just barely managed to hang on, while others experienced significant growth. The reason is that the successful companies usually do what may seen counterintuitive — when others are pulling back, they recognized the benefits of having fewer competitors and used the downturn as an opportunity to expand their marketing efforts.

Focus on connecting with customers who bring you business. Use this time to reconnect with everyone who sent you a referral in the past two years, and begin meeting with them in person.

Focus on the positive. Make a list of all of the good things that happen to you every day and keep it posted near your computer as a constant reminder that not everything is bad.

Those “sacred cows” – the way you have always done things – may need to be sacrificed in order for your business to thrive.  Now is the time to challenge the traditional ways of doing business and think creatively about your business model. The way you conducted business in the past may no longer work for you now.

Tough economic times often bear witness to a number of paradigm shifts — breaking out of a familiar pattern in order to create a new one.  Too often, we get caught up in doing what is comfortable and what has worked in the past.

We do things based on rules that make sense at the time.  Then, with the passage of time, things change. The primary reasons for the rules may no longer exist, but we continue to follow them because the rules are already in place.

Ask yourself these thought-provoking questions:

• Can you provide your products or services at a lower cost without sacrificing quality?
• How price-sensitive are your customers?
• If you were starting your business today, how would you structure it to fit with current economic realities?
• What areas of your business are the most profitable?
• Are there any opportunities to expand upon a profitable product line or service, or eliminate those that are a drain on profits?
• Does your current customer base provide opportunities for growth?

To reinvigorate your business in today’s economic environment, consider making one change in your business that makes sense today.  Then continue to identify areas that no longer serve the best interests of your business or your bottom line.

There are many online tools for blogging out there on the worldwide Web, the two largest being Blogger/Blogspot (Google-owned) and probably the one most favoured by business, and the platform this blog is run on, is Wordpress.

Wordpress has dozens of design templates, ranging from plain-Jane to stunningly gorgeous, and if you get tired of one design after a while, you just have to pick another one and click – new design!  The site supports 50 languages, sidebar widgets galore and a robust Askimet spam filter that keeps spam off your blog.

Wordpress also has some great tools that are helpful for a business blog, including an integrated stats system on how many visitors you get to your blog, where they come from, which of your blogs are most popular and – really good info here – what search engine terms people use to find your blog.

The site also “pings” the search engines every time you upload new content, so those all-important spiders come crawling your way.   And they have a feature that allows you to notify all your Twitter followers that a new blog has been posted as well.

All that stuff is free.  They also offer premium services that allow you to customize your blog with a unique URL, host it on your site, have it translated into multiple languages, add video, and more.

Engaging your customers and getting the word out about your business has never been easier – so start blogging, the world is waiting to hear from you!

These methods are great for drawing attention in the physical world, but there are also simple methods to make your event an even greater success with the use of online tools, as outlined below.

1. Your web site. Is the event advertised on your home page with a link to a separate page on the site? If not this is a key way of drawing attention to your event with people who are already interested in your product or service. Implementing an online registration system is beneficial for committing people to attending your event. Get this set up early even if you don’t have a full list of acts or times etc, you can have a “send me more info” button.

2. Use Social media. The secret to this powerful tool is to get word of moth referrals. If you tell 5 people and they each tell 5 people who in turn tell 5 people after 8 steps you have told nearly 80,000 people! Make it easy by giving them the text and a pre-shortened link, using a service like tinyurl, to your event homepage or registration page that they can copy and paste to Twitter and Facebook. For Twitter users, add a hashtag (a # sign followed by a word or phrase, i.e. #homeshow2010) to brand individual tweets about your event. This lets Twitter users (and you) easily see who else is tweeting about the event. Keep tweeting whenever you have fresh news, a new act or special guest.

3. Use email. If you have an email list use it to send a series of emails prior to the event. The first email sent out in plenty of time could be a simple invitation sent, such as ‘8 weeks prior to the event’. Make it personal, keep it short and to the point but sell it to them “A great day out for the whole family” is a good example of this. You could ask them to pre register on your event homepage and give them an incentive, maybe “Free entry to our prize draw”.

Nearer the event, say the week before, send a follow up email. A new invitation for those who have not registered with an attention grabbing headline; “Only 2 days left” “10 seats left”. Also send a reminder to the people who have already registered. A helpful reminder that can boost attendance.

4. Partners. – Ask for links from suppliers and partners. Have you got caterers booked? Are you raising money for a charity? Ask them for an advert article or link on their web site, giving you exposure and awareness.

5. Blogs. These deserve a separate section away from other types of social media as you can search for blogs related to your industry, product or service and narrow your focus on people who would have an inherent interest in your event. See if you can get a link or advertising banner on the relevant blog, as this will be beneficial for both parties.