Cost Effective Marketing Strategies During a Downturn By: Ruth Brajevich, CMO for Ware Malcomb CREW Orange County Ruth Brajevich is CMO for Ware Malcomb (www.waremalcomb.com), an international design firm offering architecture, planning, interiors, site development and graphic design services to clients throughout North America and beyond. Joining the firm in 1998, Ruth leads the company’s marketing and oversees wm | graphics, Ware Macomb’s in-house graphic design studio. Ruth is a member of CREW Orange County. Follow Ruth on twitter at www.twitter.com/WareMalcombCMO or email her at rbrajevich@waremalcomb.com. Since the beginning of 2009, almost every company has tightened its belt by reducing costs, especially in the commercial real estate industry. Ironically, at a time when companies are required to slash their spending, they also need to be aggressively marketing to compete for a smaller pool of business. Thus posing the question, “How do you creatively market your company and yourself, with fewer resources?” As a marketing professional in the design and commercial real estate industry for the past 15 years, the following are some of the strategies I have used to help my company, and our clients, in this challenging endeavor. Be Strategic with Costs With fewer resources and smaller budgets, be strategic in how you spend your marketing dollars. Carefully review the marketing expenses you are already committed to, such as advertising, trade shows, promotional materials, sponsorships, PR or other outsourced consultants, etc. What sort of Return on Investment are you getting from these channels? Are they still providing value in today’s environment? Sometimes being strategic means selecting the most valuable channel and investing in it with more of your time and resources, versus being subdivided among several channels. Are you still paying the same advertising and sponsorship rates today as you were a year ago? Renegotiate costs to a more market appropriate rate for 2010. Hire a Graphic Design Firm You might be thinking, “Huh? You are supposed to be helping me save money!” Hear me out. If you don’t have a graphic designer in-house but you do have marketing staff, this suggestion applies to you. Often, marketing professionals are capable of doing some minimal work in graphic design software programs. Allot monies in your budget to hire a graphic design firm to design templates that can be utilized by your marketing team. You are then paying for higher quality graphics and imaging, and having your in-house marketing team create the marketing concept, writing and production work. If your marketing team lacks the basic graphic software skills, hire the graphics firm to provide training to teach them the basics. This works well for materials that you use frequently including emailers, direct mail, newsletters, flyers and proposal materials. Poorly designed marketing materials can make you look like an amateur and can have a negative effect on your brand. Use graphic designers strategically to create tools, but not cost dependence. Utilize Digital Printing Even though the use of email and digital marketing has increased significantly over the past few years, there are still times when you need print promotional materials.  Digital printing has come a long way in recent years with improved quality and competitive, more affordable pricing. You can now print high quality marketing collateral in smaller quantities using digital printing. Embrace Social Media Many companies and individuals in our industry are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter as well as other social media Web sites. Social networking is an inexpensive way of connecting with people online, and can open doors to new relationships otherwise difficult to cultivate. This unique way of communicating is here to stay, and is a marketing strategy you should embrace and incorporate into your marketing tool kit. If you are a social media rookie, it can be overwhelming with the multitude of options and the variety of strategies you can employ. My suggestion is to start small and experiment for a while. If you wait to try to understand it thoroughly, you will lose valuable time and it will inevitably change on you. Social media shifts and evolves rapidly and each site has a slightly different focus, with various benefits. The following are the three largest sites as defined by the number of users, worthy of exploration. LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) LinkedIn has 55 million users in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn Members. It is becoming a more widely used site in commercial real estate. LinkedIn is a free social “networking” tool, oriented towards business development and personal brand building. It is a little more limited than other tools, in terms of your ability to grow your connections, as it is permission based. One of its greatest values is being able to stay connected to your network, even if your contacts change companies. Also, when you are connected to someone on LinkedIn, you are able to see who they are connected to and ask for introductions. Facebook (www.facebook.com) “Isn’t Facebook really just for your personal use?” is the question I hear often when I suggest companies create a presence on Facebook.  As the largest social media site with more than 350 million active users, Facebook should not be ignored. With the advent of the “Fan Page” a company can easily create a page to communicate about its brand. It also serves as an easy cross platform tool to share relevant content about your company or your expertise. Twitter (www.twitter.com) Twitter is a free social networking and micro blogging site with an estimated 40+ million users, which allows you to send and receive messages known as “tweets.” You can follow people, and people can follow you. Twitter is the 3rd most utilized social networking site and is a valuable resource for brand building, networking and information sharing. Of the three, Twitter has the most viral potential. The commitment to “follow” someone is easier to make, and therefore the potential for your ability to increase your exposure and build recognition of your personal and/or company brand increases. The best way to understand Twitter is to sign up and start following a few experienced users.  Through observation, you can learn what to tweet and different ways to interact in this interesting medium. Create a Blog Today, blogs are an inexpensive medium to write and publish your own content, giving you the ability to reinforce your area of expertise. Blogging software like WordPress and Blogger are free, fairly easy to use, and enable you to quickly create your own blog. Blogs can integrate well with your Web site and other social media channels, enabling you to leverage content you develop into a variety of uses. Leverage your Marketing Content Recently published?   Spoke at an industry event? Interviewed as an expert source? Challenge yourself to find multiple ways to use and promote these opportunities. Here is an example. You were recently featured in a commercial real estate magazine providing talking points related to your expertise. With this article you could maximize the time investment you made as follows: Link the article to your company’s Web site’s media page. Link the article to your company’s Facebook Fan Page. Create an emailer that summarizes your points, include an offering (i.e. free consultation) and link your article. Tweet about the publication, your article and the topic. Note it in your LinkedIn Status Update. Print out color copies of the article and include it in your marketing collateral. Include a summary of the article in your company’s newsletter. Include a summary of the article and link from your blog. When times are lean, creative marketing and resourcefulness are imperative to success. The great news is that now, more than ever before, there are inexpensive ways to market your company and yourself.