The Recession is Over - So Now What?

Last week, the UK Government announced that the double-dip recession had finally come to an end.  So what happens now? 

There are two things that UK business owners can now do.  You can carry on as before and hope that it gets easier to drum up new business or, you can learn from the tough economic climate and do your best to ensure that your business is not effected in that way again.

 

The way to do this is by recession proofing your business. If you had have had more customers 5 years ago, you’d have had more money in the bank to get through the difficult economic period. 

In order to ensure you have money in the bank, you need to look at how you currently get new clients. Imagine you were an angler (perhaps you are) and you were at the fishing lake with one rod with one type of bait. The angler on the peg next to you had 5 rods and 5 different baits and had each of the rods cast in different locations at different depths.  Which one of you would be the most likely to catch the fish?

You can implement this same strategy on your business.  How many different rods and different baits are you using to generate new clients currently? Do you implement each of the following?

·        Email marketing
·        Word of mouth
·        Referrals
·        PR
·        Direct mail

·        Telemarketing
·        SEO (search engine optimisation)
·        PPC (pay per click)
·        Display advertising (Facebook, Linked In, Remarketing)
·        Website visitor tracking
·        Social media (including blogging)

·        Field sales reps.

If you are doing all of these things then you are definitely doing the right thing.  You just need to look at continuous improvement of each of these strategies in order to lower your cost of customer acquisition and increase your conversion rates.  A 1 or 2% improvement on each of your activities will yield a significant increase on your return on investment.

If you’re not doing each of the above then, there is room for improvement in your current customer acquisition strategy.  Don’t be overwhelmed by the task, take each element and implement them one at the time.  The trick is to build up the activity level on your business generation until you've got a joined-up strategy where each activity is feeding into the other.  i.e. your PR feeds content for your social media and email marketing.   Once you've got a process where all of the activities are being implemented at least once a month, every month, the results are exponential.  You will propel your business to financial stability and comfort quickly so that the threat of another recession leaves you with fewer sleepless nights.

Your other option is to call in the experts to get advice or assistance in implementing your customer acquisition strategy.  Chose a company such as a full-service marketing and lead generation agency who is already doing all of those strategies on their own business and you can be confident that they will be up to the task for your business too.

For more information about how Stratique can help you to recession-proof your business, call us on 0845 226 3095, email blog@stratique.com or visit http://www.stratique.com/.  If you want help generating more business from your website then see the information about turning your website into a RED-hot lead machine by visiting http://stratique.com/Lead_generation.html