Immediate Marketing

It's a tough time out there. Spending is down, customers are paying less attention to marketing campaigns, and funding is tough to get. Plus, for every strong company that manages to weather the hard times, there are three or five or ten that simply don't. But that still leaves a lot of strong, vital firms that climb Success Mountain on the backs of those who have fallen. Do you want your company to be left when the dust clears? You've got to refine your product and market it more assiduously than ever.

But, as this week's interviewee, Greg Erman, CEO of marketing automation software supplier MarketSoft, tells it, this simply isn't the time for slow campaigns that take six months to produce results. Now is the time for speed. Now is the time for quick movements with quick results. And now is the time for you to learn about Immediate Marketing from Greg Erman.

The End of Mass Market Campaigns?

Erman put it well: response rates to e-mail and snail-mail mass campaigns are down. Way down.

"With the economy the way it is and people kind of distracted, I don't think people pay attention much to the mass marketing mediums like direct mail or e-mail. And with what's going on with bioterrorism and the Anthrax scare, no one's looking at their hard copy mail anymore," says Erman.

The answer, he adds, is fewer mass mail campaigns and more human-to- human contact.

"Doing less advertising and broad-based direct mail, and doing a lot more seminars and going to vertical industry trade shows. It's getting more into Jay Levinson's guerilla marketing model as opposed to a Philip Kotler mass market branding kind of model," he says.

Need for Speed

"Budgets are much tighter and CEOs are demanding more from marketing. Otherwise it's just going to be eliminated. It goes along with the fact that marketing gets cut first. So marketers need to be able to demonstrate that they can provide impact immediately, that they can provide impact in the current quarter, not two quarters forward. That's a completely different paradigm from how marketing has operated in the past," says Erman.

And what management wants to see are results. Sales can only be generated by following up leads. And leads, right now, can be much more efficiently generated by using high-touch sales methods - such as seminars - rather than mass market campaigns that can produce results but are slow.

High-touch campaigns can be laborious to put together, true. But automation and infrastructure processes can be put into place that make planning a high-touch event as easy as an e-mail campaign.

"Think of it as a massive project management system or an assembly line for marketing where you want to be able to do lots and lots of events, lots and lots of seminars. We do a webinar (web seminar) every other week as an example. We're at two tradeshows right now. Just doing a lot of high-touch communications at the same time requires a massive amount of efficiency, and that requires automation and infrastructure in place," he says.

"High-touch means targeted events. Targeted means much smaller numbers, but in order to get the scale that any company wants, you have to do many, many more of them. You've got to do a lot more targeted events, which means you need greater efficiency and greater speed," says Erman.

That high-touch contact generates leads. You can direct your salespeople to chase down those leads rather than keeping them busy generating more leads they won't have time to follow up. Once again, the name of the game is speed.

"Given that the cost of acquisition is much higher in this model because you're doing more targeted marketing, the value of every lead is much greater. Therefore, the need to make sure it gets acted upon is heightened," says Erman.

It's fast, fast, fast, and that's how it ought to be in these tough times. Only the strongest companies will survive. And only the most pedal-to-the-metal competitors will survive along with them. This recession probably won't end in a few months, perhaps not for years. But even in a tough climate, some businesses will keep clawing their way to the top. And the next boom will find them sitting on a big, thriving company.

Does your company have what it takes to move fast and market your product before a competitor shuts you out? That's what you should be doing, right now. We hope StrategyWeek.com and Erman helped you on your way.