As you close the door to 2007, decide to bring the best of your small business enterprise with you into 2008, while you leave behind the unsuccessful actions. It is wise to identify and name your successful actions and to quantify them. Your first action should be to define your small business marketing plan. Create new marketing ideas.
The instinct in a downturn is to cut back, consolidate and reorganize. Such an interiorized focus will kill your business. It is in bad times that you should reach out and market, market, market. Find new avenues for new business: create ways in which to increase your repeat business; build your brand, optimize your web site, find new products, find new promotional channels. Get your attention out into the marketplace and off the confusion and the turbulence it has brought into your business.
In bad economies the first thing big companies cut is their promotion and their marketing. If you reach out, and are fast and effective with your promotion, you can pick up some of their customers and appropriate some of their channels. All of these will be up for grabs, but you won’t see them if you are looking inward.
The successful entrepreneur knows how to increase market share in a downturn.