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Marketing your Las Vegas company is the current economy is now more important than ever. Without effective marketing strategies in place, you will not be able to reach new potential customers, and as we always say, if you aren’t marketing, your competitors surely are.

With this in mind, I’ve compiled a list of links that discuss and outline top effective marketing strategies for businesses:

• The Top 7 Marketing Strategies for Independent Professionals on a Budget - BusinessKnowHow.com
• Best Marketing Strategies - helium.com
• Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies of 2009 - marketingcharts.com
• Top Marketing Strategies for Businesses on a Budget - UnArchived Articles
• Web Site Marketing Techniques Rated - streedirectory.com
• Best Marketing Strategies for Maximum Sales - Combining Market Research, Brand Management, Advertising and PR - suite101.com
• Top 5 Guerilla Marketing Strategies - sparxoo.com
• Top Email Marketing Strategies For B2B Marketers - webpronews.com
• Top 8 Strategies to Marketing in a Recession - ElementsDaily
• Niche Marketing Strategy - How to Greatly Increase your Odds of Business Success by Using a Niche Marketing Strategy = Geisheker Group
• Market Targeting - learnmarketing.com
• How To Find And Sell To Your Target Market - about.com
• Target Marketing - Targeting Strategies - websitemarketingplan.com
• Top Small Business Marketing Trends for 2009
• Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies - about.com
• Seven Top Online Marketing Trends for 2009 - ClickZ.com
• The Top 10 Marketing Tips of All Time - marketingscoop.com
• Business Owner’s Toolkit: Marketing Strategy
• Business Marketing Strategy Essentials - bizrave.com
• One Page Marketing Plan Template
• Marketing Plan Outline - quickmba.com

In tough economic times, especially here in Las Vegas, it is easy to eye marketing and market research as potential victims for the chopping block. However completely axing marketing can have devastating results for a Las Vegasbusiness.

Consider an analogy: A runner’s muscles need air. Even though the muscles may not have burned all the oxygen in the blood, the lungs continue pumping new air, new oxygen into the blood stream. Without the lungs continuing to pump air and oxygen, the muscles would use up whatever oxygen was in the blood and then tire quickly before failing completely Does this seem like a far fetched analogy? I assure you that it is not. Cash flow and continued patronage are the oxygen of any business. And marketing is to business what lungs are to a runner: Marketing continually pumps in new business, new patronage and new cash flow.

But if a business has worked hard to develop a loyal customer base, why can’t it rely on this base until things loosen up a bit? The answer is simple. There is no such thing as a loyal customer base. It’s not that customers are fickle and whimsical. It is that the customer also exists in a fluid environment where they constantly have to make choices in order to provide for and protect their families. In a free market system, competition is fierce. In a free market system during a recession competition is brutally fierce. Your customers need reduced prices while still getting quality products or services. If your business doesn’t provide this, it is 100% guaranteed that someone else will. Would you really expect your customer to turn down a better deal out of loyalty? Would you remain with a vendor if the vendor no longer offered your business the best deal available?

So we’ve established that there is no way to just hold your breath through a recession and hope your customers stay with you. But your business is in the red, you are dangerously short of liquid cash and marketing is as much art as it is science. How are you supposed to know how to apply your money when you need to be sure of a return? Of course, there are no guarantees but there are a few things to remember. A recession shakes things up. Some of your competitors will freeze up. They are not your worry. Your worry is the horde of competitors who are hungry, a little desperate and ready to try anything to take a bite out or your market share. Some of them are going to make mistakes, be hasty and blow their budget on ineffective marketing. Some of them will be do something different, effective, will tap into the customer’s need for comfort during a recession. You need to be one of these companies. Easier said than done?

However, there is one fundamental that is often ignored when people get scared. Keep it simple! It’s a recession. People aren’t in the mood for anything cute. They aren’t in the mood to see a company blow millions on a slick ad campaign. People want security, longevity, reliability, honesty. Those qualities are best communicated by customer service. It takes a human face. Don’t bug your customers with surveys, followup phone calls, etc. Teach your employees to always ask what the customer needs and mean it! It’s shocking to see how often companies try to pitch their customers. In good times, customers put up with it because it’s often entertaining. In hard times, customers just go somewhere else. Don’t anticipate their needs, ask them what they need. Improved customer service requires thought, energy and leadership but isn’t inherently expensive. It’s not an ad campaign but it is far more effective if implemented sincerely. And while you’re at it, if you want your employees to be sincere and attentive to your customers, why don’t you ask them what the company can do to alleviate some of their stress? What do they need to do their job well? If you tell them to be attentive, very few will comply. If you model it, most of them will be happy to imitate the behavior. Sincerity is infectious.

Dropping marketing during a recession isn’t an option. To complete the analogy: Just as it is even more crucial for a runner to breath deeply through the most demanding exercise, businesses must market, pursue customers, communicate with customers during a recession. The analogy holds true. If you stop marketing, you may as well try to run a race without breathing.

PR can be an invaluable tool to help promote your company’s brand and website and create awareness for your company or business in the local Las Vegas community. Most smaller companies don’t have the budget to hire a professional PR firm to help get the word out about their business, however, there are many free or low cost ways you can promote your company using online PR services.

With regard to PR, online press releases is an excellent tool to get your company out into the Las Vegas community. Press releases are created for a variety of reasons: new client acquisition, community involvement and volunteer work, new hires, company growth, and much more.

As a marketing professional, you might consider radio advertising to promote your Las Vegas business or company. Radio advertising can be effective and cost-efficient. It can help you widen your brand awareness, advertise specials and promotions and gain more clients.

Radio stations are a great place to reach your specific target market because radio stations are formatted for and marketed to very targeted audiences. Think of the difference in audiences that listed to talk radio vs. oldies vs. top 40 vs. hard rock. Furthermore, a radio station’s audience is broken out further into specific times of day a particular segment listens, morning drive time vs. late night, for example.  The demographics are also broken into age groups as well.

In a nutshell, radio offers a very highly targeted way of reaching a specific audience in the Las Vegas market.

If you are considering radio advertising in Las Vegas, you might think ahead about:

• Who will create your radio spot/s?
• How many times will your ad/s run, on what stations, and at what times?
• Will you work with a marketing/advertising agency or try to set up the ad campaign yourself?
• How will you judge the results of your efforts?
• What is your budget?
• Who will write your ad?
• How will you negotiate the ad rates offered?

Let’s say company has some of the best products in the marketplace. Their products are cheaper than their competitors, and in terms of functionalities offered, they seem to be the best products on the market. Yet, when it comes to sales, the product is lagging far behind. What could be the reason? 

To the naked eye, you may not be able to think of any logical reasons, as everything just seems to be going fine with their product. As a result, you could possibly attribute it to luck… or the lack of it!

Think about it – Something must have gone wrong somewhere. Possibly, the company did not brand itself well, or rather, brand their products well. Whichever way you look at it, branding is an activity that companies cannot look at compromising at any juncture.

So what is branding?

For most people, branding is all about the name of the company. For some others, it really starts with the name of the company and then goes on to other aspects like the Mission, Vision and other things. 

In essence, the name and the tag line with the name should be good enough to catapult the image of your company. A classic example in this case is Nike. See how “Just Do It” was so wildly popular!

Importance of Branding

The significance of Branding cannot be emphasized enough, and definitely is not something that could be discussed in a matter of few pages, or few words. The value of branding to a company is immense, and to say that it is invaluable for a company is definitely no exaggeration.

Of course, branding helps improve the acceptability of the company with it’s target customers. Suddenly, people start recognizing your company by something they could associate you with. For example, people recognized Nike as the “Just Do It” company. There’s no reason you could not create a similar situation with branding your Las Vegas company or business. 

Branding Increases profits

The latest Forrester study reveals that companies who had invested their time in a good branding activity ended up seeing 10-20% more profits than their competitors who did not spend as much time or budget on branding. It clearly is a domino effect. Good branding means a lot of people recognizing and accepting your product.

Branding can directly or indirectly also affect the psyche of your employees. For example, if your company has a catch line, “Customer First, You Next” transpired on to all your employees, you would find your employees living by this catch line for a lot of time. 

The point discussed before is good enough to suggest that the aspect of increased customer satisfaction is not a mirage at all with branding. Most good companies would tend to orient their brand strategy around branding. The belief that increased customer satisfaction would help companies ring in good sales numbers quarter-after-quarter, year-after-year, allows people to think positively about branding.

Summary

As an activity, the importance of branding can never be undermined. Just a company who has benefited tremendously by focusing on this simple fact. And go ask a company who did not wish to think about branding their company or business at all. The difference would be clear as day.

Contact Perkolate about Las Vegas Branding solutions.

Starting a Las Vegas business is most certainly a big undertaking, ripe with a ton of research and due diligence. One of the core strategies to take in starting a businesses is to make sure you have a marketing plan for your new Las Vegas business.

Creating a marketing plan can be done through a variety of different options. If you’re budget sensitive, you can attempt to write one yourself.  If you really have the time to think about it, strategize and research, you should have no problem putting together a basic marketing plan or marketing communications plan.

Here are some articles on how to write a basic marketing plan for your Las Vegas company or business:

• What to Include When Writing a Marketing Plan
• How to Write a Marketing Plan
• Outline of a Basic Marketing Plan

So you have your professional marketing materials - your business card, letterhead, envelopes, brochures, flyers, etc. - and now you are trying to choose the Las Vegas printing company you will use to print the materials.

There are a few questions you should ask yourself before researching a printer in or out of Las Vegas:

• Are your marketing materials standard sizes?
• What quantities of each are you ordering?
• How quickly do you need the materials in hand (turnaround time)?
• Do your materials have special cuts (die-cuts)?
• Do you want special papers or custom PMS inks?
• Do you have master files and a PDF copy of each of the pieces to provide to a printer?
• What is your budget to have the materials printed?