Doing what may seem counter intuitive can turn this recession into an opportunity to grow.  For example:

Don’t cut back on your level of customer service—increase it. Think of this as your unique competitive advantage.

Continue to invest in marketing. Done properly, marketing is not an expense; it’s an investment. And since your competitors are holding back, this is the perfect time to continue your marketing to help you pull past those competitors.

Contact your best clients every month. Send out an email at least once a month to your customer database and entice them with some offer to come in.

Don’t make major decisions based upon your emotion. During stressful times, it’s easy to do this. Instead, talk to a trusted adviser or mentor and ask for their advice before you make a final decision on major issues.

Take care of yourself and your employees. Last, but not least, make sure you and your employees are getting enough rest and balanced nutrition.  Take time out for yourself, to recharge your own batteries.

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.

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.

The first step in building a successful email marketing campaign is to build a good list.  Here are some tips on building an email list for marketing your business:

Website Home Page

Have a box on the home page of your website that is just for getting people to sign up for something.  Entice them to provide you with their email address by offering something useful and free – perhaps a newsletter or industry white paper, or some kind of product promotion or discount. Whatever you choose, however, has to be of value to your customers.

Meet, Greet, Add

When you attend trade fairs, exhibitions or networking events – wherever it is that you might meet potential new customers or are collecting business cards – ask the people you meet if it is all right to add their contact information to your mailing list, in exchange for a newsletter or special offers.

Interest Group Lists

If you are a member of a trade, business or community organisation, request access to their membership list.  Some organisations offer them to members free of charge, while others charge a fee for list usage.

Mutual Marketing

If you find a newsletter that may be of interest to your customers, ask if they’ll promote your newsletter if you do the same for them. If you are in a service business, partner with other professionals who serve the same customer base that you do and cross-promote each other in your outgoing communications

List Purchase

You can purchase a targeted list based on your ideal customer profile and use it to test a variety of promotions or special offers.

Building an email list that will help you drive traffic to your website is an integral part of a well-rounded marketing program.

There are customers you are uniquely qualified to help, customers who can afford your products or services, and customers who can bring you repeat business. To be an effective marketer, you need to know who your ideal customer is.

Below are nine questions to help you determine your ideal customer. You should answer these questions as specifically as you can. Ask yourself, “If I had my choice, what would I most like to focus on with my customers and what types of customers seem like a perfect match for me?”

Here are the 9 questions:

1.      Who’s your ideal customer? (Think in terms of age, profession, gender, education, interests, marital status, family size, hobbies, and lifestyle.)

2.      Who can afford your products or services? How much can they afford? What’s your value to them?

3.      Who could be a good long-term, repeat customer?

4.      What qualities, characteristics and values do they have?

5.      What are you helping them accomplish?

6.      What are their issues, challenges or pain?

7.      What is it like working with them?

8.      Who could be a good source of referrals for these ideal customers?

9.      Who is NOT your ideal customer?

Spend some time thinking about these questions and answering them as carefully and as specifically as you can. When you finish, you’ll have laid a strong foundation for developing successful marketing strategies.

Social media networks have become an excellent way to gather real-time feedback from customers and prospects and the good news for companies is it can all be done online for free.

Here are some of the most popular social networks and what they have to offer:

Facebook – if you have a Facebook Fan page for your business (and you should), you can add a polling application that allows you to ask questions and gather data via fan votes. Fans can also share the poll with their friends, thereby extending the reach of your brand.

Twitter – Twitter has an application called TwtPoll that lets you set up a question and then tweets it to all your followers, who can also retweet it to theirs as well. TwtPoll gives you options for question formats, including multiple choice, ranking, rating, image choices, comments, and more. You can also extend your TwtPoll to other social media sites, including Facebook.

Twitter also has great conversation tracking tools to monitor what people are saying about you. Monitter lets you track in real-time via keywords. Tweetbeep sends you an email every time your brand is mentioned, with links to the conversation.

LinkedIn – get feedback from your LinkedIn business connections by going to LinkedIn Answers and posting a question.

Blog – you can create a poll on your blog by utilising free polling applications like SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy or WuFoo.

Website – using one of the free polling services to host a poll on the home page of your website not only can furnish you with good information about how you’re serving customers, it can also help you create a dialog with your customers and draw them in to your online community.

Social media monitoring tools also allow you to respond quickly to any customer service problems as well. So it’s important to not only monitor, but also respond when problems arise and people are talking about it online.