10 ideas to finding opportunities during business downtime

Downtime can be scary. No business wants downtime. Yet, for better or for worse, you’ll likely find yourself facing a slow day, week, or, as many businesses know all too well as of late, month or even year. While you can plan for some business lulls – such as holidays when most of your clients are out of town, you can’t plan for all of them.

What’s important is how you handle your down time. Do you twiddle your thumbs when things are slow? Spend hours on Facebook with one eye on the clock? Take the time to catch up on some of your favorite TV shows online?

OR, do you look at these less-than-ideal slowdowns as an opportunity? I humbly suggest you go this route, and I’ll tell you how.

First, you’ll want to create a simple Downtime Plan of Action. This can be as easy as typing up a bulleted list of things you need to do for yourself or your business but can never find the time for.

Here are 10 easy-to-use suggestions to get the ball rolling:

1. Conduct a competitor analysis. Identify your top five competitors and do some research on them. What are their strengths and weaknesses? What do you do better than them? What should you be doing better than them? How does their media coverage compare to yours? How does their website compare to yours? Are there things you can do to better compete?
2. Develop new business. Call up your local chamber or other professional organization and ask if you can serve as speaker for an upcoming workshop. Network. Reach out to business leads.
3. Build a stockpile of blogs or articles. You know you need to publish blog and article content regularly. Publishing new, fresh information related to your industry positions you as an industry expert and also creates valuable backlinks that increase your search engine optimization. When times are slow, write some new content that can be published at a later, busier, date.
4. Choose something in your industry that you’d like to know more about but haven’t found the time to really learn. There are a number of great, and free, webinars and training programs available to you if you’re interested in gaining a competitive edge.
5. Update your website. Go through your site page by page and target the items that need to be updated. Are your most recent honors and awards listed? Are your bios up to date? Have you launched any new products or services that haven’t made their way onto your site?
6. Ramp up your marketing efforts. It’s going to be mighty difficult to attract new business if no one knows you exist. Slow times are the best times to spend some marketing dollars.
7. Do something nice for your clients or customers to show your appreciate them.
8. Come up with new ideas for your clients or customers. (Although this is an effort you should be doing on their behalf anyhow.)
9. Organize your paperwork. When tax time comes around, do you literally spend days on end organizing and hunting for all those loose pieces of paper you know you put … somewhere? Take the time to create a more efficient filing system. You can literally save yourself hundreds – or even thousands – of dollars by ensuring your tax documents are in order.
10. Create a more efficient work environment for yourself. This can be as simple as de-cluttering your desk, office or e-mail Inbox or as complex as replacing systems that aren’t living up to standards.

There are many more things you can do during a slow period, but the above ideas should be enough to get you started.

Melissa Rothermel serves as Director of Media Relations for Imagine Marketing.
E-mail Melissa at mrothermel@imnv.com.

Marketing Rule No. 1: Consistency is the Key

If you spend any amount of time at the Imagine Marketing headquarters, there is a pretty good chance you’ll hear the word “consistency” being thrown around at least once, if not all of the time.

It would be easy to disregard this word as more marketing mumbo-jumbo, but the fact remains that when we say it, we mean it.

You might wonder exactly what we mean by “consistency” as it relates to marketing. Here’s a bit of insight: consistency means ensuring every part of a marketing campaign works together to send the same message to your audience about your product or service.

Example: You operate a yogurt shop. Your business is all about incorporating the idea of fun into everything that it does. That’s your shtick. That being said, your brand and marketing message should reflect your company’s character in order to create brand consistency. This includes: your logo and brand design, press releases about your business, events that are planned to promote your business and so on.

I should also mention another part of consistency that is often dismissed: a consistent overall strategy.

Example: If a company begins a public relations campaign because it wants to connect with its customers through media and community partnerships, then it must give the strategy enough time to be effective through its use of consistent messages and tactics. One press release about a newly hired employee probably won’t get you on the front page of the paper or on television, but a strategy that includes well-timed ongoing press releases will help to position your company as “the expert in your industry” in the eyes of your publics (including media), thereby bringing your organization results.

At Imagine Marketing, we have never been much for throwing tactics at a wall and watching to see what sticks (although I hear that particular “watch to see what sticks” strategy works well when cooking spaghetti). Instead, experience has shown us that if you have a little faith in the process and you are using the right channels, results will follow.

Of course there are times for changing strategies, but if you’re always changing the strategy, you’ll never know what’s working. And that is why consistency is key.

Megan Lane is an account executive with Imagine Marketing.
Contact Megan at mlane@imnv.com

Even when things get hectic, focus should stay on customer

We all know that doing business has been tough over the last few years. The economy has changed. Doing business has changed. Many of our industries have changed. Quite frankly, it’s been crazy out there!

But while we’ve watched our world, literally, change around us, there are some things in business that shouldn’t change. One of those things is making an effort to understand your customers and their changing needs.

Making a point to know your customers is beneficial for several reasons: it allows you to tweak your offerings to continue to serve their needs, to better understand them, to pinpoint possible trends and issues that could, in turn, affect your business in the near future, and to better market yourself to them.

Recently, I listened to an excellent webinar hosted by PR Web and featuring John Jantsch, author of “Duct Tape Marketing,” and he touched on this very subject and provided a number of questions that businesses should ask every customer.

Those questions are:
1. What would you Google if you were searching for a business like ours?
2. Why did you hire us?
3. What’s one thing we do better than our competitors?
4. What’s one thing we could do better?
5. Would you refer us?

Once you have collected a sufficient number of responses, it’s time to analyze your feedback. Do your products, services, customer service and marketing efforts reflect those responses? If not, it’s time to re-think the way you’re doing business.

This isn’t something that should be done just once. This simple process should be done on an ongoing basis. Each time you review your feedback, try to look at your results with a fresh set of eyes to ensure you aren’t disregarding subtle shifts and trends that, if addressed early, could help you keep your position as a leader in your industry.

I know it’s sometimes easy to put your own business on the back burner when you’re working overtime to keep customers happy and the doors open. However, investing in yourself can yield valuable returns that make the whole process worth it.

Melissa Rothermel serves as Director of Media Relations for Imagine Marketing.
Contact Melissa at mrothermel@imnv.com.

Holism vs. Atomism

Holism and Atomism are two totally opposing philosophies on how to view and consider the whole – be it economy, society, ecosystem, business or pretty much any system. An atomist believes the whole is best served by breaking it down or analyzing its separate parts and the relationship between those parts, and the holist believes that the whole, itself, is primary. The “whole” is always greater than the sum of its parts.

The atomist divides things up to understand them better; the holist looks at things or systems in aggregate and suggests that we can better comprehend their nature and their purpose from that perspective.

It’s important to realize that while these philosophies are opposing, they are both vital in the success of any group endeavor. As a business owner, you must consider the mission of your company as a whole. Your business is looked upon in terms of holism. Your business rides a wave of opinion created from controlled communication through advertising and marketing as well as reputation of service through word of mouth. To understand what you must become, you must see things in a holistic perspective. It allows you to then consider what must be done internally to affect that outcome.

We work in a creative environment here at Imagine Marketing. We are full of big ideas and equally big egos. But we understand that our goal is to give our clients the best of us. This requires an openness to one another’s ideas that, at times, requires the dialing down of the ego. A few times as creative director, I’ve decided to go against my gut reaction and chose to give another idea some time to develop and grow. I’ve often been pleased by the results of this gut wrenching method of creative development. This I feel is one of the ways to use the atomist philosophy in the creative process, with the holistic perspective being the motivation.

Going against our own nature and doing what doesn’t come natural (by ignoring your creative needs or relinquishing them when appropriate) is difficult, but it can prove to be better for the common holistic goal. The other benefit to using this technique is that people feel valued. We still have our disagreements here at Imagine, but I feel that everyone is given a chance to shine at one time or another.

So you say you want a business full of happy people who want to do their best for you 24/7? Then I suggest you dial down the ego and listen awhile. Your employees will appreciate your consideration and will hopefully be anxious to give you more ideas in the future. And those are great building blocks for any business.

Alex Raffi serves as Creative Director for Imagine Marketing.
Contact Alex at araffi@imnv.com.

A change will do you good

With the day-to-day grind and the hustle and bustle of your daily work schedule, it is always tough to sit back and really focus on your own business’ marketing materials. As with the old expression everyone knows about the shoe maker and his shoes, a lot of times we focus so much of our efforts on our clients and external projects that we forget to step back and really evaluate our own materials.

Internally, we have tried to minimize this common dilemma. For starters, we boldly decided last year to officially designate Imagine Marketing as one of our own top clients. This helped us think in a more structured way about our materials and new concepts. It also helped us begin testing new innovations and creative ideas on ourselves first, and after the guinea pig tests were completed, we would confidently relay the successful ideas to our clients. It was a sort of litmus test that eliminated a lot of the risk with venturing into new concepts.

One of these new ventures, which has been enormously successful to us, as well as our clients, is our e-newsletter. We converted communications to the digital format and set out to feature staff, clients, interesting topics, and hopefully even educate a little along the way. You have no idea how great this tool has been in regards to client relations and how much positive feedback we have received. But just like any machine that is fine-tuned and running efficiently, we got comfortable and continued moving full speed ahead. We recently took a step back and continued this ongoing re-evaluation process. We knew that this process can only be successful if you continually work it. That’s why we realized it was time for a fresh approach to the e-newsletter … a la, the new look.

As Sheryl Crow sings in one of her songs, “A change will do you good.” I am a firm believer in branding and always preach about building a long-term plan around your image and brand, but that doesn’t mean you can’t continually implement new ideas and bring fresh approaches to your overall brand message.

At some point, a new and fresh idea is no longer new and fresh. That is what innovation is all about: taking something that eventually becomes bland and making it better or reinvigorating it into something new. It doesn’t always have to be a huge or overdramatic change. Just fresh and different. Even Arby’s agreed several years ago with their great “Different is Good” campaign (this is the ad nerd in me coming out). From time to time, you need to work on getting more comfortable with creating a change and not being afraid to do so. I can confidently say that I even have the President agreeing with me on this concept of “Change.”

At the end of the day, your business is what you structure it to be. I challenge you to step back for a brief moment from your e-mails and ringing phones, think about your own business, and realize that it might be time to fix yourself a pair of shiny new shoes.

Ehsan Kaveh is an account executive at Imagine Marketing.
Contact Ehsan at ekaveh@imnv.com