Things are slowing down.

At least all the signs seem to present this reality.

If you are a marketing professional, it’s time to sit up straight. Your job just became much more important.

“As large corporations redouble their efforts to find more profitable paths to growth, they’re looking for strategic and operational leadership from the marketing organization more than ever before,” stated a Strategy+Business article.

Whether you are a big or small business, chances are you are feeling the pinch.

My friend, Brian Carroll had this to say:

If you want to flourish regardless of the economic conditions, you need to look for ways to help your sales team execute and improve performance.

Much like a savvy investor who buys when the market is down, smart marketers can capitalize on this opportunity (and beat competitors), by bringing focus and attention to their lead generation efforts.

A recent IDC marketing study found the following, as reported by B2B Magazine:

Lead generation is the top marketing priority for tech marketers this year (ranked 4.3 in importance on a scale of 0-5), followed by brand awareness (4.0), online and interactive marketing (4.0), alignment with sales (3.9), marketing performance measurement (3.9), customer knowledge (3.6) and channel/partner marketing (3.4).

So what is the solution?

Simply put: Stand out by giving away great content.

The fact is that people always need to do research. Indeed, with tightening budgets, research will become a mandate for many of your prospects.

You can trump your competition by providing valuable educational content in the form of a white paper.

The one tool that performs exceptionally well during economically slow times, the white paper will help your prospects make decisions.

The theory is this: Give a person something of value. The person returns the favor by giving your solution consideration when shopping.

Being part of the “short list” of firms under consideration will provide you an exceptional competitive advantage over your competitors.

So get writing people—before your peers beat you to the punch.

If you have had success with white paper during an economic downturn, I would love to hear from you. Heck, if you have anything you’d like to say, speak up.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Marketing, Writing White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.