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In rough economic times it is more important than ever to promote your products and services and to stand out above your competitors. Customers will try to buy the best product at the best price. And it's your job to convince them that you offer the best solution.

However, with money being short, marketing budgets are often reduced and marketing managers face the difficulty of maintaining results in a difficult market and with reduced funds. The immediate reaction is often to try to entice customers to buy by offering discounts and special deals and by running as many low-cost tactical marketing campaigns as possible. Whilst these methods achieve short-term sales, they may de-value your brand in the long-term and decrease profit per unit. But there are alternative options.

1. Redefine your targets
Your key objective was to achieve 80% brand awareness or being a known innovator? You might need to rethink and focus on areas that can help the business through hard times such as low customer attrition and bigger share of wallet. Focusing on your most profitable customers or selling more in a very profitable category might be more important for a while.

2. Review your activities
Despite claiming to be creative, marketing departments often sticks with the same activities, because "they just work!" But when did you last review that they really deliver the right results? Or that something else wouldn't work better? This is the time to audit your activities and identify what makes money (and then roll it out or milk it) and what wastes money (and then stop it or change it to become more profitable). This way you can save costs without impacting on your results.

3. Adjust your product and service offering
In rough economic times customers buying behaviour changes. Are your key products still the right ones to promote? How can your products help customers and what do they really want. You need to understand your cudstomers expectations and needs even more than normally and then focus your marketing - including products, service, offers and messages - on this. In simple terms, what is the point to promote the latest high specification product for the discerned customer, when right now your target audience just needs something affordable.

4. Maintain customer service
With savings being made in most companies, customer service departments often takes a cut. If there are less customes, you need less staff in store or in call centres to serve them. Don't follow the trend like your competitors but ensure your service remains top or is even better than before. Dissatisfied competitor customers will turn their business to you when your service excels. And they may stay with you in sunnier times.

5. Increase you marketing budget
This might sound ludicrous if everybody talks about cuts. But customers think more careful what they want to spend their money on and try to reduce their purchasing risk. When competitors stop advertising and you give messages important to the customer you'll get a good return on your money.

When times are hard, money is tight and activities need to provide the best possible results, you need to readjust how you market your business. But think about how to achieve this without devaluing your business and risking future earning potential. By making it all about the customer you will get through hard times and you'll come out stronger at the end.

Learn more about this author, Sandra Selley.
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