Note: Our seven sickly cows articles are a series of posts dealing with moving past the bad economic conditions that defined business since late in 2008. In particular, we are talking about marketing for an emerging economy. Click on the previous articles.

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Last week I talked about how your customer base has changed as we come out of six bad economic years. This week I want to expand upon that and talk about how marketing mediums have changed during the years of the seven sickly cows.

One of the ways that customers have changed is their use and comfort in using electronic technology. Part of this is the retirement of Baby Boomers and the emergence of the Millennials in the marketplace. Wealth is changing generational hands and with that comes the values, attitudes and choices of a new generation. The Millennials always have a wireless device in their hands. All of that impacts how we market our business services and products. But also recognize that during any economic downturn of any length of time, we look for ways to shed jobs and still stay in business. Typically that means we turn to technology to make us more efficient. It is very true of this period of bad economic times as well. Technology has advanced exponentially. All of this is centered around doing the things we did before the Great Recession more efficiently and economically. Think for a moment of the business of mobile technology as it was in 2008 and where it is today. We have moved beyond the Blackberry – the cutting edge of mobile business in its day – to replacing the desktop and laptop computers with cloud based tablets and Smartphones. These two factors – the emergence of Gen Y as a target market and our new way of doing business more efficiently – is driving marketing mediums more and more to electronic formats.

Your online presence is more important now than at any time you have been in business. Does that mean that traditional marketing mediums don’t work anymore? No, but their impact is limited compared to electronic marketing. The immediacy of marketing to mobile devices in particular is critical in the emerging economy. Your website home page is your storefront. Your social media interaction is your customer service department. How often you update and the speed of your interaction with these mediums are critical to being taken seriously. That is because the mobile device has made every business transaction a real time exchange.

All of this can be totally overwhelming to anyone who is trying to plan and implement a marketing plan. Does this mean we have to devote a full time marketing position to someone who does nothing but post and reply to social media 24/7? And where is the conversion to sales in all those tweets and "likes”? Let me offer some advice. If you plan well, you can drive much of the work you used to do with traditional marketing mediums and turn them into new medium formats. For instance, you may have had a product brochure that spelled out the features, advantages and benefits of your lines. You may have included marketing methods such as customer testimonials in this brochure. You can take the same info and turn it into a web page. Now make a blog post out of the features of this product and ask the same customers to add their comments to the blog. Now tweet about the same product and post it to your LinkedIn site. You have taken the same essential ingredients that you put into the brochure and made it an electronic post… but this is better. How so? Now you have connected with everyone who is following the customer who added the comment. The same is true of anyone who retweets, shares or "likes” the post. It has the ability to become much larger than the old brochure. This is the beauty of the new medium. Think through your other traditional methods. Did you have a phone book ad, a spot on the radio, a sign on a busy street? All of it can become so much bigger in an electronic format.

There is a temptation to treat all of this as a passing fad, but it is not going away. It is the new way of doing business. We are living in changing times and the marketplace has changed. We are no longer living in the years of the fat cows and your marketing tactics have to change to reflect that fact. I would encourage you to take a good look at your current customer base and the emerging technology that they are using. Find out how they are changing the way they do business. Your marketing has to change with them if you are going to move past the years of the seven sickly cows.