Finding Your Marketing Mojo
By Bob Martel, JMB Marketing Group

That big zipping sound you just heard was the sound of your clients closing their wallets. It can be down right depressing, can’t it? Not a good sign, indeed, for us marketers, but I suggest you merely take that zipping sound as a major motivating force to make your company the best marketer in your industry, bar none. Get started right now. Don’t lose your marketing mojo!

Forget about all of this doom and gloom economic news that stares you in the face at every bend. Forget about the fact that it’s so depressing. Besides, what choice do you have? If you let it happen, all of this bad news can force you into ruin. Forget that your CEO just sliced your marketing budget in half or decided to spend it elsewhere. Therapy won’t help you bring customers in the door (okay, maybe it will), but there is no magic marketing pill.

You can decide to hunker down and ride out this marketing storm – and run the high risk of crashing into the rocky shoreline, or you can face the storm head-on by deciding to finally implement true marketing leadership. Use that ‘zipping sound’ as an anchor to motivate and program the best minds in your company to step up to the challenge and when the wallets open up – your prospects choose to do business with you (because of the high perceived value you deliver and your smart marketing).

In spite of the times, it’s time to get your marketing mojo rising again. No more marketing blues, okay? Come in off the ledge and get to work!

Whether ‘mojo’ conjures up the sounds of Jim Morrison’s LA Woman or Muddy Waters’ Got My Mojo Working… it’s time to get enthused about loving your customers! Your marketing mojo is going to be the rocket fuel that propels you forward while everyone else is standing still. If you are standing still you are not going to survive. Period.

Consider these points in helping you find your marketing mojo:

• Marketing strategy is king – and you need a marketing action plan that you can get excited about! Tough in today’s world, but you can’t run away from the challenge. What could be a higher priority that having the smartest marketing strategy? It worked for Big Blue back when IBM sold typewriters (way before my time). They were the best marketer of typewriters. Remember when the first electric typewriter came out?

• Would you invest your own money in your company, knowing what you know about the current state of your marketing system? Your marketing system is the cash machine (or not) for your business. Stop waiting for the phone to ring or for a customer to walk in the door. Take massive marketing action to create business now. Status quo marketing efforts won’t help you anymore. Put a plan together you can believe in and ‘sell it’ to your employees. Everyone is in sales and marketing now, regardless of their job function.

• Gather your brain trust and explore all ideas, past and present. Whether your company is a large enterprise or a small business, it’s time to stop treating marketing as a necessary evil, and it’s time to make every marketing dollar work overtime to generate qualified leads to your sales team. Look at your industry and outside your industry for new ideas.

• Tap into your trust capital, and the marketing success of others who have access to your prospects. Look at joint ventures and leverage the goodwill that others have spent a fortune on. Trust is a company asset that I’ll bet you are overlooking. Send me an email with Endorsement in the subject line and I’ll send you a roadmap for leveraging trust and how you can turn an investment in postage and letterhead into serious cashflow.

• Get real clear on the ‘benefits of the benefits’ of your products and services. More than ever, although it should always be the case, you have to believe in your products and services, your company’s ability to consistently deliver high value, and you have to know the underlying subconcsious reasons people buy and don’t buy from you. Know the core desires.

• Now is the time to make every customer relationship count. Aside from the marketing software you use to stay in touch with customers, what are you doing with key accounts? Use this slower time to educate them, use it to build trust in new ways, look for other ways to serve your existing accounts. What’s your plan for customer retention, and for winning back lost customers? Are you focused on the longer term, lifetime value of a customer? Show your current customers how much you care – because they are feeling the same pinch – and you risk losing them when the economy improves – because you took them for granted! They will remember those who worked with them during this time. They face the same challenges and they hear the same zipping sound you hear. Every lead, every opportunity matters.

Doing more of the same marketing and sales activities that are producing marginal results is not going to carry your company through these slow times. Be careful not to start rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Don’t panic either. Instead, focus on the marketing action that is going to keep your business afloat.

Remember, the wallets will zip open when the value of your products and services are evident. Of course, you still have to practice (and master) the fundamentals of smart marketing, smart sales and smart customer service. There’s a lot to it, but it’s not that difficult when you decide it’s critical to your survival.

Keep that mojo rising.

---Source: Bob Martel is the principal consultant at JMB Marketing Group, in Sterling, MA. JMB Marketing works with business owners and principals to help them take their business where they want it to go, ultimately to help them generate all of the business they can handle. Bob can may be contacted at (508) 481-8383, or through his web site, www.jmbmarketing.com, where you can sign up to receive his Marketing With Ease newsletter.