You’ve had to cut your Marketing team. So how are you going to win new clients now?

In these exceptional times every business is looking hard at their operating costs. Reassessing budgets and reducing business overheads wherever possible is, of course, the sensible thing to do.

One of the first costs nearly everyone sees as non-essential is the marketing budget - it can be cut and it won’t impact the business too much. It’s not like it’s a vital part of business delivery such as the departments dealing with production or customer service, right? Wrong!

The ‘We can do without marketing’ trap!

All it takes is for enough of your clients to cut back on projects, put projects on hold or for some of your clients to go under and you’re in a hole with no easy way back out.

During previous recessions, and we can see it happening again right now, businesses have and are making the mistake of taking an axe to their marketing programme, their marketing team and associated budgets.

Research has time and again proven this to be the wrong course of action. Companies that maintain or increase their marketing spend during a recession come out of it in a much stronger position than those that cut their budgets, and they also grow much more rapidly afterwards too. It’s a sad fact that many businesses that cut their marketing spend won’t make it through the current downturn at all.

Look at it this way, if you don’t keep your new business pipeline full, then at some point your business runs out of work. When that happens it’s unlikely that your business will be in a financial position to restart, or have the time required to get marketing and sales delivering enough new business again.

Remember marketing isn’t a tap you can just turn on and off. When you need more new business it takes time and effort to identify, nurture and bring new clients on board, and those timelines only extend further during a recession.

Surely the Sales Team can do it all, can’t they?

It’s a common mistake to assume that your sales department can deliver your marketing for you. Sales and marketing are both specialised functions requiring different personality types, different skill sets and an in-depth knowledge of the ‘mechanics’ in each area.

The Sales role, though hugely important, now only makes a 20% contribution to the onboarding of new clients. Marketing supports the other 80% of the process.

Effective marketing today is complicated. Businesses can and still do utilise all the traditional marketing methods and advertising mediums, but you now also have to understand and employ digital tactics such as social media, email, search, content, influencers, video, online advertising, chatbots, click-funnels and more. You need experienced, expert and knowledgeable marketers and creatives to make all of this work effectively.

By cutting people from your marketing team you either lose the experience you badly need at the top, which is vital to ensure that your marketing efforts are focused and deliver the results that you need, or you lose the capability to deliver the marketing collateral and content your business needs to implement as you’ve lost key design and production roles. You can’t expect a junior marketer to look at the big strategic picture and control your marketing or the senior marketer to be writing your social media posts on a daily basis.

What’s more, expecting one person to be the high-level marketing strategist, your marketing manager, a social media whizz, a copywriter, a collateral production expert and an events wizard is just not realistic. If you find such a person well done, but don’t expect them to stay long or deliver the value that your business needs at this time, as you’ll be loading them up with the burden of the entire marketing process that is normally carried by a whole team.

So what’s the answer?

Realistically, it’s impossible for one person to be familiar with all of the above, stay up to date and actually have time to deliver the marketing your business needs to survive.

So if you’ve shrunk your marketing team already, or you’ve decided that you can do without them for the foreseeable future, then you need to think about how you can support your business with the skills that you have lost.

Utilising external support can be a cost-effective way to fill in the missing gaps until things are back on an even keel again.

At MC+Co we can provide all the knowledge and skills you need to support your existing marketing team or act as your virtual marketing department if you no longer have one. You can work with us on a project by project basis or dip into our services as you wish, with no long term commitment.

To find out more about MC+Co’s brand and marketing services call +44 (0) 1277 366898. Alternatively please fill out the form below and we’ll get back to you asap.