In today’s tough economy, you need to make every marketing dollar work harder and smarter. By focusing on marketing basics, you can keep your business thriving and growing. Challenging? Yes. Possible? Absolutely. Here are five common sense marketing techniques that will help you use your marketing dollars wisely.

• Know your customers. Regardless of the state of the economy, and whether you are offering a buildings insurance comparison or selling a computer game, your customers should be the starting point for all marketing strategies.Winning a new customer costs two to four times as much as keeping a customer so it is a smart investment to do everything you can to keep your customers happy. Learn as much as you can about your current customers. Analyze their buying habits to find ways to increase sales to them. Make their experience with your company so outstanding that they provide word-of-mouth marketing to others. This type of marketing is priceless.

• Cultivate prospects. While current customers are critical to your success, you need to continually cultivate prospects if you want to keep growing your business. Focus on untapped prospect groups who would make profitable customers. Develop a plan to reach them. Position your products and services to be as attractive as possible to turn these prospects into customers.

• Focus your message on your customer. Marketing is all about the customer — or at least it should be. Unfortunately, too many businesses spend time and money focusing on themselves and never talk about what the customer wants to hear. Experts estimate that the average consumer is hit with 3,500 to 5,000 messages daily. If your message has any chance of breaking through that barrage, it must be customer oriented. Your message must acknowledge your customers’ pain points, explain your solution and indicate what makes your solution different from that of your competition.

• Sharpen your marketing tools. Now is a key time to look at how well your marketing tools are working. Does your website offer information your customers want? Do you give them a reason to come back frequently? Is your electronic newsletter focused on you or your customer? Are you using marketing methods that actually reach your target audience?

• Use low-cost marketing techniques to enhance your budget. There are many low-cost marketing techniques that yield big results if you are willing to use them consistently. When you network, follow up immediately with new contacts. Send an email or set up a meeting to build the relationship. If you don’t follow up, networking is worthless. Send a hand-written thank-you note when you meet with a prospect. Keep your database updated so you can stay in touch with customers and prospects. Speak to community organizations and professional associations. Volunteer on nonprofit boards.

Joan B. Marcus, president of Joan B. Marcus Communications LLC, helps small businesses and nonprofit organizations build their brand through the power of words. Learn more at http://www.joanbmarcuscommunications.com where you can also sign up for a free subscription to Words That Work, a monthly newsletter that offers practical and low-cost strategies to help you market your business.

© 2009 Joan B. Marcus Communications LLC