Businesses that fail to see the value in communicating their corporate strategy and objectives with their existing customers are missing out on a golden opportunity to develop stronger relationships. Surely, argues Cris Beswick from Let’s Think Beyond and David Gallagher, B2B Copywriter at Chapter & Verse, all businesses should be striving to achieve this in tougher economic times.

You don’t need to read another article about whether we’re officially in a recession or not. Your brain starts to switch off the minute people preface their first sentence with ‘credit crunch’. And quite frankly, you’re sick of seeing the ‘top ten tips to marketing your way to success in an economic downturn’ that appear on virtually every blog, business page and unsolicited email you receive. Like it’s that easy.

So if you’ve read this faar you’ll be pleased to know this isn’t another of those articles. Because we think your time is more important than that. And ours certainly is.

Most businesses we work with, whether in the good times or the bad, are more focused on growing by attracting new customers. Develop the right products, target the right customers with the right messages in the right media and of course that is more than achievable. It’s good marketing practice after all. But few businesses we work with have anything that remotely resembles a strategy for increasing value from the existing client base. And even less have an overall strategic vision that their core stakeholders – employees and customers – can articulate.

Focusing time, effort and resource on your existing client base makes economic sense in any type of economy. By thinking more innovatively and more creatively, businesses retain existing customers, encourage them to cross and/or up sell and protect their revenue streams from the predatory new business activity of competitors. But such thinking doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen by attending a residential training course. It fails to permeate an organisation if only a handful of senior people buy in to the concept.

To create the right culture in a business, one that embraces creativity and innovation from the shop floor to the boardroom door, takes time. Done well, however, return on investment is always guaranteed and once a tipping point is reached, the new culture becomes self-perpetuating and sustainable. Business leaders need to be able to understand how their employees think, how they can be motivated, how to develop an entrepreneurial zeal and what will inspire them. By doing this, teams and individuals become more engaged and more productive. They get under the skin of their customers. They develop products to meet the future needs of customers. They develop needs that the customer sometimes didn’t even realise he had.

An innovative and creative culture doesn’t just stop at the factory door. Such businesses actively interact with and engage their customers to help them develop new products or new services. After all, if business leaders can see value in asking staff for their ideas, comments and opinions, it makes obvious sense to ask the same of their customers.

Ok, so we promised no ‘ten tips’ and we’ll stick to that promise. Improving the value of your existing customer database, what we have termed Old Business Development, can be undertaken by sole traders to multi-national organisations. Below is a roadmap for Old Business Development that we use to help our clients. Begin following this framework and your organisation will already be well ahead of many of the competitors in your industry.

1. Define relevant, strategic objectives
2. Get the whole business to engage and buy in to them
3. Begin to work on changing the culture of the business to make it more innovative and creative
4. Communicate internally to align the new culture to the company’s vision
5. Communicate externally to demonstrate how the new culture and strategy better understands and meets the needs of existing customers

Once you are on the journey it is vital to communicate it to both employees and customers. It shows confidence in your business, it shows how you are forging ahead of competitors, it shows where and how the business will grow and it identifies strategic opportunities that will be exploited. we have found that even businesses that have started such a journey, and are making headway, can forget about the importance of communication. In such instances it is often left to an individual or group in the organisation, not expert communicators with the added pressure of their days jobs to contend with. By not prioritising it to the same extent as strategic planning or cultural change, the quality of communication can be poor at best, non-existent at worst. As a result the full benefits of Old Business Development are left unrealised as employees disengage and customers become confused.

With more money and resource required to correct such a situation, isn’t it just simpler to do it right first time?

Cris Beswick is the Principal of Let’s Think Beyond, which helps businesses unlock their inherent creativity and innovation to deliver tangible commercial results.

David Gallagher is a Senior Copywriter at Chapter & Verse, a business communications agency.

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Then start giving stuff away. Not just any stuff. Stuff that your customers and prospects will find of value. Use a B2B copywriter to draft a white paper that can be downloaded from your website by readers who provide their contact details. Get yourself a speechwriter, get yourself on a presentation course and whenever the opportunity arises, speak up. Speaking engagements at exhibitions, events and seminars is a great way to spread your brand and businesses without costing a fortune. And if you do undertake speaking engagements, get them professionally recorded and get them on your website as downloadable podcasts – again accessible by submitting contact information.

At Chapter & Verse we’ve completed two recent projects for blue chip multi-national clients in the technology sector that do just what we’ve described above. For the first client, Capita IT Services, we wrote a white paper on Customer Experience Management, targeting Customer Service Managers in local authorities. The gist of the paper was on the lines that within the public sector, a slightly different approach than CRM was required – as citizens don’t choose to have a customer relationship with their local council; they have to. The paper positioned Capita IT Services as a partner who can help local authorities become the customer-oriented, efficient and effective organisations they want to be (and that their citizens and central government demand). The downplaying of technology and sales related messages was deliberate.

We also wrote a 6pp business paper for Fidelity Information Systems following a breakfast briefing event they held (and recorded) for their customers in the financial services industry. The paper summarised the presentations of the three keynote speakers at the event and was sent to all those who attended, as well as all those who expressed an interest but were unable to attend. The article put forward the proposition that in an environment where funds are limited, volumes down, margins cut and competition fierce, the challenge facing financial services organisations was how to wage a battle on three fronts; converting the right customer, minimising the risk of bad debt and eradicating fixed costs out of the business fast. With Fidelity’s help, of course, all could be achieved.

Don’t be afraid of giving information away above and beyond your core value proposition. Most businesses don’t. And for us, that’s a good thing.

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Many businesses I meet for the first time have for years undertaken all forms of business activity from their own viewpoint, not their customers. As a result, communication problems often occur as the customer and the business don’t just see things differently, at times they are almost speaking completely different languages.

An organisation that understands its customers and speaks their language is therefore, by definition, going to be more successful. A b2b copywriter can work with businesses to help them look at the world from their customers’ perspective. By identifying customer insights and evaluating customer behaviour, it becomes easier to understand why customers do what they do and just as importantly, why they don’t do what the business wants them to.

Using such insights and analysis to influence and improve all forms of b2b marketing and b2b advertising improves customer communication and can lead to dramatic increases in the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

You don’t have to keep spending marketing pounds to improve performance dramatically. Here at Chapter and Verse, we do it by helping our clients get into the shoes of their customers and understand how they see things. We then translate that insight into b2b copy that talks to customers at a peer-to-peer level, understands their needs, speaks their language and by doing so removes barriers to purchase.

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With all the press columns on credit crunches, rising utility prices, mortgage crises, slumping housing market and falling manufacturing output it seems that we are going to talk ourselves into a recession, even if the reality is a little different.

A recession is defined as two quarters negative growth in GDP, so whilst this hasn’t happened yet, we’re not in a recession.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that many of your customers might be acting as if they are, so what can you do about it?

In any slowdown, advertising and other forms of push marketing drop. This is because when budgets are slashed, the channels with the least ability to measure marketing ROI are cut. However, at the same time spending on direct marketing grows, with research in the US showing that in the last six recessions since 1950 there was an increase in the spending on DM. Similarly, research by McGraw-Hill in the US showed that for business-to-business firms who maintained or increased their advertising expenditure during the recession of 1981-1982, they achieved significantly higher sales growth than those that eliminated or decreased advertising. And by 1985, those companies that advertised aggressively in the recession period grew their sales 2.5 times faster than those that reduced their spending.

So what should your b2b marketing focus be on during a recession?

Lead management – in a recession risk-adverse buyers take longer than normal to come to a purchase decision. You need to have a clear strategy for taking prospects through the awareness, interest and engagement stages of any potential sale.

Focus on existing customers – if you have less money to attract new business, invest more time in developing and building the relationships with your existing customers.

Sharpen your online marketing – build dedicated microsites and landing pages, optimised with keyword rich content, to provide more targeted, more relevant and more appropriate messages to visitors searching for your products and services.

Provide more added-value content – use white papers, best practice articles and thought leadership editorials to provide valuable information to potential prospects over and above your core offering.

Reduce barriers to purchase – as recession generally makes businesses more risk adverse, new and younger companies need to develop new ways of building trust and reassurance to avoid potential buyers sticking with safe or traditional options.

Accountability – don’t undertake any form of b2b marketing unless you can demonstrate the impact of the activity on sales pipeline and revenue.

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We help our clients communicate more effectively with theirs by improving the words on every piece of marketing activity they invest in. Whether it is words for a website, a piece of packaging, an advert, a brochure, a leaflet, an article, a presentation, a news release, a tender document, direct mail, emarketing or sales force aids, we help make it more targeted, more relevant, more appropriate and more persuasive.

We’ll be using this site to share some of the techniques and tips we use to help businesses communicate more efficiently and effectively.

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