社区: Chief Marketing Officer's Exclusive

How to create value with no budget !
We are talking about big companies and not small size businesses.

Thank you in advance for your tips, experience, strategy, ... idea?

Due to my experience I hardly believe that there is no budget available at all. The tricky thing in some companies, who do not have a precise marketing culture, is that marketing expenses are covered by sales departments (promos, fairs), engineering (sales documentation) and/or the general management (adverts, incentives). Therefore the 1st step should be the analysis of the budgeting split and process and merging those different sources to a unique and separate budget, which has to be linked with a marketing strategy and planning. These diversified budgets for marketing activities are even more critical as value can only be developed in a common and harmonized manner.
Regards
Raymond Ratchford

Agreed, although even for bigger SMEs in the engineering industry it can still be merged with others as I experienced myself.
Regards
Raymond Ratchford

Successfull marketing is primarely based on a successfull message and not on a large-scale-budget. The function of a large-scale-budget is to boost a message, but a weak or bad message can not be compensated by impressive budgets. The most interesting fact in this simple finding however is, that a strong message does not rely on the budget's amount to be successfull, however on the creativity of its 'owners'.

Working for different companies I search first of all, what kind of news do they have which may be interesting for others. It is astonishing to see, that every company has its own news, stories and messages worth to tell. And this is another interesting fact: even though time goes faster and faster and conditions change from one day to the next, in sales the old formula 'to sell is to tell' is still valid.

So, as soon as you have found a story to tell, make sure the story you have is told in its best way. And the best way is when potential and existing customers are interested to listen to it and feel in the end to obtain a unique (added) value.

The next step is to start to distribute the story in all channels you have:
- to your employees (to all your employees not only to the sales or customer departement)
- to your existing customers
- to potential customers
- stakeholders
- multipliers (such as business partners, chambers of commerce, etc.)
- medias (very important)

by using all tools you have:
- media releases
- website
- e-mails
- letters
- powerpoint presentations
- invitations to lecture
- building up networks, etc.
- (web 2.0)
- etc.

Search for a person who will be responsiple for this task and let him develop the message. Make him feel that the message is his baby and let him grow it up. Make sure that his work is honoured.

Important: The story you decided to tell must have the potential to become part of your brand awareness. In this concept I am not talking about "a flash in the pan" stories followed/replaced by another the very next day. And the story must also have the potential for further development and extension without loosing its core message.

Using this simple concept you will achieve more success than you imagined before, even though you started with a 'zero budget'. If you like to learn more about it just send me a message here on XING.

Kind regards
Stefan Schär
该文章于2009-11-02 06:08 pm被修改。

Yes, great opportunities all around - especially with web 2.0. But also true: the larger the company - the more of the budget goes into "must haves" (faux marketing) as price list, product documentations e.g. Whatever the size of the company though - I strongly believe: the better the product is... the higher your chances are on getting good results from zero budget (more realistic "low budget"). Me-Too products and advertisting-fairy-tale-benefit-products will always need more marketing blabla - and spendings to tell their stories.

A very good question indeed, Olivier (funny that you asked it in July and we all answer in November ...)

Marketing with no (or little) budget is possible. If it wasn’t, not only very few start-ups would have developed to a significant size, but also many major successes from large corporations would not have taken place. You can do good marketing with (almost) no money if you have something strong, intriguing, and innovative (a piece of information, a product, a service). The devil is in finding cheap/free ways to present it to the right target group and in a highly relevant context.

In a B2B space, this means being clever at leveraging a web of personal connections, both online and offline. This should start with leveraging the established network of contacts of your company, and continue with approaching relevant associations and formal or informal forums. For example, if you have a very nice piece of finance software for portfolio managers, or a great service offering in the field of data centre security for CIOs, you probably don’t need a huge marketing budget if you are clever at engaging directly with the decision makers and generating word of mouth among them. I haven’t selected these two examples by accident; some of the best players in these two areas are unknown from the general (business) public while being extremely successful. Another example of very cheap (although not completely free) marketing, is provided by the many medium-size software companies who base their marketing on small informal after hours or breakfast/diner meetings with clients and prospects, creating a sense of community while using satisfied clients to convince prospects. What is the factor of success of all these techniques? The personal relationship and the face-to-face interaction (even when also using web 2.0 tools as part of the process).

In a B2C space, driving marketing with no or little money means finding ways to create and generate word of mouth, like in B2B, but usually on a larger scale and, most often, with a more diverse target group. If you are selling something very exclusive, a selective word of mouth approach is very useful to give your prospects a sense of being part of an “elite”. If, on the contrary, your offering is targeting the mass market, although word of mouth can help, you will probably have to invest some budget before you can dream of a significant impact. An illustration of this is the amount of creativity and budget invested by major brands into creating viral videos and other sorts of viral campaigns. Simultaneously, there are many examples of very small brands building themselves a very compelling level of visibility with some outrageous viral campaigns and for very little money (a few thousands Euros only in some cases).

Now, despite the above, I would agree that a CEO who does not want to invest at all in marketing should be fired.