The GFC has given many of Brisbane's businesses a hit in the last year, but the way you market your company plays a huge role in economic recovery.  This article was published in the September 2008 Ronin Marketing eMagazine, but it's as true now as it was then.

The biggest danger for you is to not do the things that will actually get you the sales you want because of a desire to “tighten the ship”. Doing so has every chance of making things worse. But, to quote a famous boxer, “It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s how hard you can get hit, and keep movin’ forward. …That’s how winnin’ is done!” Ok, so while few of us are in the habit of taking business advice from Rocky Balboa, Sly put it perfectly when he defined winning as a result of moving forward in the face of adversity. When this attitude is viewed in a business context it makes perfect sense, especially when you see people dropping as the going gets tough.

Times like ours present a great opportunity to actually forge ahead of the competition. How? There are a few ways.

Firstly, you need to see the current climate as an opportunity rather than a time to panic. When times are tight only the proactive and strategically placed will survive. Thinking of ways to properly and effectively market yourself better than your competition can help in attracting the right type of client. If you don’t develop ways to proactively look for and pick up the ‘good’ work on offer, it is most likely that you will end up more reliant on an increased volume of the less established clients (who incidentally provide lower profit margins).

When the economy does tighten these are the first people to disappear. The larger, more lucrative work will come from the more established players who have a higher tolerance for volatility and will provide a more secure, larger and for the most part, hassle-free income stream.

It is these “premium”, quality clients that you want, as they appreciate quality and are willing to pay for the extra benefits they receive in return. The main trick is to work out how to differentiate your business in a tangible way that these people find appealing. Additionally, while the natural reaction is to think about consolidation and protecting your business in the rougher times, it is an all too common mistake to neglect other opportunities that such times present. Among many others, well-renowned author and successful entrepreneur Tom McKaskill, notes it’s important to remember that when your business is slowing, your competitors are also likely to be struggling. This can present a key opportunity to gain market share provided you can show your potential customers why you are superior.

“Burying your head in the sand” only presents these opportunities to your competition. Astute business owners who push forward at this time benefit greatly in the long term while those who negatively approach a downturn at best save a small amount in the short term. If these businesses can somehow survive until the economy improves (on a reduced client base), they will essentially be trailing the competition anyway and will need to spend a lot more on marketing just to compete. They’ll also need to rely on greater loads of work from less desirable clientele. In other words, they’ll be on the wrong side of the 80/20 rule. Unless you’re a supermarket, the statistics show you can rarely make money from volume over quality.

The tight market places more importance on customers choosing the ‘right’ option. Just like you, in these conditions clients need more of a reason to justify their expenses. Through marketing it is possible to show you are the more suitable and best choice to chosen audiences. In tough times, depending on your industry, workloads do reduce and the competition inevitably becomes cut-throat.

The Short Version: When it comes down to it, there are only a few primary things that get you seen on search engines such as Google, and none of them require ongoing fees to be gouged from you to get good results. In fact, ongoing optimization fiddling can damage your search results and even get you "booted" from Google altogether. 

The Explanation: This is because your rating basically comes down to what content’s on your site and how many people consider it of interest by visiting, or linking to it. The search engines have a bunch of robots (or spiders) scouring the world’s websites, reading their source code to work out your site’s content.

Part of a good site’s code will include “meta tags” which are a list of the right keywords you want to associate with your business. Most search engines read these tags and compare them with the content on your pages to see if they match, before assigning a relevancy score which determines your page ranking. Your content is both the paragraphs of text that you have on your site, as well as the words in your headings and title tags, which have special relevance.

While it is important to periodically review and tweak the meta tagging and search optimization techniques of your site, it is simply a waste spending time (and money) on changing them on anything like a monthly basis. There is evidence such tweaking can actually impede you gaining a good ranking over time. Even worse, there are "SEO Optimisation" companies who promise to get you to #1 of Google who use dodgy techniques that get the "optimised" site banned. 

The Upshot: There’s a LOT of snake oil being sold out there, and people charging to do not much at all. Once your site content has been coded in the right way and the metatags are set up, there simply isn’t much else to do that will get big results.

Don't get me wrong - your website still needs to be Search Engine Optimised. But beyond getting the key stuff right, your time (and money) is better spent marketing in other ways so that people visit the site, adding content that people will go to, and setting up strategic partnerships. After all it is really this content that the search engines are looking for - the different types of coding just gives them a chance to find it.

The Short Version: Flash is pretty, but can make the embedded content more difficult for search engines to find. 

The Explanation: Until recently, any content contained within a Flash file is invisible to the spiders on search engines. There are still some limitations on the file sizes, and Google’s robots can’t execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed. So although certain aspects of flash can be read, for the immediate future they still offer nowhere near as much compatability as html. Bear in mind not even Flash’s makers, Macromedia, have a 100% flash site!

The Upshot: For the time being, Flash should be used sparingly, and incorporated intelligently into your other site content. Searching issues aside, Flash also creates very large pages and for people not on broadband (which is still a large number), these pages can be frustrating slow to load. You should have a really good reason for having a Flash-heavy website.

The Short Version: Numerous web developers are pushing that you need your pages to be “Dynamic”. This sounds more sexy than “static” pages. Although there are indeed cases where having a dynamic site will help, don’t overlook that a major reason web companies like pushing them is that they can charge you more for less work on their part.

The Explanation: Think of a dynamic site as a database with a templated front end or interface. This interface can be tailored for you, or in the most shoddy versions, is just cloned from job to job with your logo and photos stuck in. In those cases, all a programmer has to do is whack in the content you provide him and he’s done.

This is sold to you on the premise that it’s a benefit: “You can change the content yourself!” This is true. However, it doesn’t negate the fact that you can end up paying more for a dynamic site even though you end up being the bunny doing most of the work to “build” it with the content you provide. Some of the CMS (Client Management Systems) end up being a bit difficult for the average person to use, and require someone with coding knowledge in order to make new page layouts that look polished enough.

The Upshot: Think about what you are wanting the website for. It needs to have a broader purpose than merely being there. Your site should then be approached with that in mind, and that will dictate whether you are best served by any number of different sorts of dynamic or static sites.

Myth #4:  That  buying  your  site  via  a  monthly  ‘plan’  is  always  a  good  idea.

The Explanation: Many of these style of arrangements are more of a site rental than a purchase. There have been cases where web designers go out of business (or get another job), and sites disappear because he’s been onselling the hosting charges. Ronin Marketing was dealing with a lady recently who was in the middle of legal action against a website company who had charged her tens of thousands to develop “her” site over the last few years but are now sacking her as a client and refusing to give her access to the site that she thought she had paid for. She had, but they are claiming Intellectual Property rights. Their argument is that she never “bought” the site. As the business is entirely an online one, she now has a major problem. 

The Upshot: As usual, the devil’s in the detail. Don’t assume the rights are yours if you don’t ask. We have a policy not to do anything but sell you a site outright. It’s yours because you paid for it.

We also believe that there’s less headaches if you don’t tie your site to a particular ISP via any sort of deal, mainly because that way you aren’t locked in, so we don’t do that either. (We do take care of all the setups and management for our clients though. That way they can do whatever they want in the future.)

The Short Version: They don't. Sounds harsh, but people generally only care about what you can do for them. Everything on your site needs to bear that in mind. It’s not to say you shouldn’t have an “About Us” page, but you need to be aware of what purpose it’s serving.

The Explanation: Your site isn’t a Facebook page – your website’s job is to sell your products or services, so the normal rules of advertising apply. This means that you have to establish not only what you can actually offer your prospective customers beyond saying “We stock X” or “We offer Y services”.  What are the benefits of them dealing with you versus your competitors? What purpose is your website serving in your broader marketing approach? You need to know the answers to these questions.

The Upshot: Think about what your site should be doing. Some sites are constructed to save money on hard copy catalogues or to make your products accessible to a broader geographic market, or to play the role of sales rep via delivering product news. Some do all of these, plus gather new long term sales leads for you. You won’t get value from your site unless you can resolve these broader and ultra important marketing (as opposed to programming) issues.

The link between good marketing practice and the right sort of accounting is undeniable. Here, Jeffrey Budd explains how using these two disciplines together can engineer success.

The majority of business owners that I meet tell me that they want to grow, but the real question is into what? I come across a lot of businesses that put the majority of their focus on increasing revenue, hoping the increase in sales will mean an increase in profits. The problem with this approach is that not all sales are created equal. Many a business has found themselves in serious cash flow trouble and with lower profits even when the total turnover has increased or even stayed constant. One area every business needs to look at is their sales mix.

Ok, so what does that mean?

The term sales mix refers to the relative proportions in which a company’s products are sold. Every business generally has a number of products that it sells, and may even have thousands. Now each of these product lines or product categories will have a different profit margin based on the direct and indirect costs of making it. There is also a secondary issue in relation to the cash that is tied up in making, holding and delivering that product and this will affect your overall cash flow position.

The idea is to achieve the combination, or mix of products, that will yield the greatest amount of profits. Hence, profits will depend to some extent on the company’s sales mix. Profits will be greater if high-margin rather than low-margin items make up a relatively large proportion of total sales.

Changes in the sales mix can cause perplexing variations in a company’s profits. A shift in the sales mix from high-margin items to low-margin items can cause total profits to decrease even though total sales may increase. Conversely, a shift in the sales mix from low-margin items to high-margin items can cause the reverse effect—total profits may increase even though total sales decrease. It is one thing to achieve a particular sales volume; it is quite another to sell the most profitable mix of products.

In reality the sales mix of most businesses has occurred through an organic process rather than a strategically planned one based on facts and figures. The worst scenario is the business owner who drives sales down a planned track only to find out (normally when it is too late) that the decision was a very bad one. Often this is driven by the normally simplistic view of a marketer who promises to double sales, but has no idea what affect it will have on all other aspects of the business.

You may look at a profit and loss statement and come up with a gross profit margin based on total sales, but what does it really tell us? One profit margin for maybe a hundred different products or even five different product categories isn’t going to give us any real insight into what products are truly right for increasing profits and improving the cash flow of the business.

Getting the sales mix right will allow you to fully utilise your limited resources to achieve the biggest return on investment for your business. Analysing your sales mix will allow you to see how it will impact on such things as staffing requirements and more importantly, how you will invest your marketing dollars. Knowing what your optimum sales mix is lets you target your marketing campaign to maximize future profits derived from these sales.

The final word, crunch your numbers to give you the information you need to analyze your sales mix to see how it affects your margins, staffing, overheads, profits and cash flow.  If necessary, adjust those products that aren’t a good fit. It is great to increase your turnover, but there is a fine balance that you must keep in order to maintain a healthy and profitable business. The first step is to know what’s the right sales mix for your business, remember, not all sales are created equal.

Jeffrey is the Principal of Jeffrey Budd & Associates, an accounting firm that specialises in working with small to medium enterprises. Their website is www.jpb.com.au

Remember “New” Coke? Anybody? Coca Cola almost went bust trying to outdo Pepsi in the eighties. Everyone hated the new formula so it was quietly buried after many months of preparation and untold millions spent rolling out the “improved” product. Where did they fall down?

Ironically although they did a lot of research, they read it all wrong. Blind taste tests showed that people actually preferred the sweetness of Pepsi when sampled, so that’s the direction they went in.

Unfortunately there’s a big difference between liking a thimbleful of sugar and being happy to chug down two cups of the stuff. Another factor was that Coke managed to betray one of their main strengths – people’s fondness of their brand and its history. Everyone was unilaterally offended that such an icon would dare change something associated with their happy memories associated with the brand.

KFC trying to use their “Finger lickin’ good” slogan in China, which unfortunately translated to “Eat your fingers off.”

In Taiwan, the Pepsi slogan of “Come alive with the Pepsi generation” converted to “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead.”

German makers of knapsacks refer to them as “body bags.”

Coors’s slogan of “Turn it loose” was read by the Spanish market as “Suffer from diarrhoea”.

A few years ago, some Einstein at Reed Business News thought it would be a good idea to run with the slogan “If it’s news to you, it’s news to us.” They changed it after a couple of days…

Not sure how long it took the New Hampshire Police to realise the unfortunate placement of the exhaust pipe in this public transport advertisement.