With reports of rising unemployment and the economy growing at a lackluster pace of less than 2% annually, there is real cause for local business owners to tighten their belts and hunker down.  But the ones that do might miss a once-a-business cycle opportunity.

As much as business are feeling the strain on their budgets, so are consumers, and now is a great time to earn their loyalty by offering them value.  Packaging separate products or services at a low price, or offering a short-term introductory rate, might be just what is needed to get them to switch from a competitor who is going to be struggling too.

Better yet, create partnerships with other businesses to pool your marketing dollars together.  This allows you to get more out of what you spend on Chicago marketing while rivals cut these budgets entirely, undermining their businesses.  Chicago Marketing firms like Ocean Strategic Group can help you decide how to spend marketing dollars on strategies and partnerships that offer high ROI, while cutting efforts that aren’t supporting your business.  The way to fail in a tough economy is to decrease your visibility by cutting marketing.  Once you have done that you’re relying on your existing customers, who are looking for ways to cut their spending too.

Tags: budget, chicago marketing, economy, local business, marketing partnerships

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 9:44 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.