It may be in your best interest to think about hiring a marketing company to “position” your company. This may help even if you have been in business for a while.

Exactly how should you position your product, services and company in your marketplace so that you can “own “it? Your products or services have a position and that position comes from the mind of your customers or prospects.

Do you know what your customers, clients or patients think of you and your company or practice? Do you realize that this perception will affect your income and future sales?

What specifically prompted your customers to buy from you in the first place? Would they do it again? Why or why not? Do you know why you lose customers - and how to correct it? 

I remember changing dry cleaners once because they kept breaking the buttons on my dress shirts. I never told anybody…just changed companies.

How do you measure your current marketing campaigns? What works? What doesn’t work? You need to have a system in place to evaluate your advertising and marketing, so that you can continue to do what works. A sure sign are new faces, new business, new phone calls, and a steady increase in revenue and profits!

How about your competitors:

Does your name encourage customers to buy your product or service? Is it easily remembered? Your name should also communicate what you do. It’s great that you have named your business after your grandfather, “Fred”, who started the business, but if you sell furniture, you are better off marketing “Fred’s Fine Furniture”, so that new customers will know what you do.

If there has ever been a truism in marketing, its that when the available market share decreases, your ad plan needs to increase. Increasing your plan does not mean spending more, it means that your plan must get much more cost – efficient, making the same ad budget work harder.

As we have stated before achieving client growth in an expanding economy is easy, since the market place takes business forward. However, achieving growth in a retracting economy is a demonstration of real marketing prowess.

Lately we have been seeing a lot of Yellow Pages advertisers seeking an alternative to the books. Since Yellow Pages usage is down dramatically over the last ten years, its clear that consumers are beginning to use Google and yahoo as well as local television websites as local search engines, for the simple reason that the data found online is fresher. Phone numbers still work, companies are still in business and the consumer can instantly click over to the business website for even more information.

Let’s study a specific media plan from a cost perspective. Breaking down the CPM analysis, it turns out that this advertiser was spending six hundred dollars for every one thousand homes reached. Few businesses can afford to spend anything close to this high a CPM and still expect to make money. When we structured a TV advertising combined with a Web plan, the cost per thousand came in at twenty five dollars.

By moving to television and Web marketing, the owner of the business was saving so much in customer reach costs that he literally was putting five hundred and seventy five dollars back in his pocket with every one thousand TV viewers he bought. We asked the president of the company what he liked about TV advertising, he said, “My competition is still advertising in the Yellow Pages, I am on television, who do you think will get the phone calls?”

Television campaigns that are boldly executed draw the attention of consumers no matter what the market conditions are like. So next time you hear a complaint about a weaker economy, go look for weaknesses in the marketing plans. It’s the fastest way to improve profits.

Thanks to Adam Armbruster, partner in Eckstein, Summers, Armbruster and Co. in Red bank, NJ.