When an economy starts to slow down all business start to lose clients this is completely normal. These clients that you are losing are moving on to an alternative product thats more accessible to them and of cores cheaper. This does not necessarily mean you have to go and cut your prises especially if you know that your products are already competitively prised. One thing to remember is that business all round is losing their client and that those client has to go some were. And this is why you have to be a smart marketer now it is more important to get your competitors client than trying to get new client. You should develop your marketing plan to target clients that are leaving your competitors for all the reasons I motioned earlier, this does not mean that your marketing will only bring in clients that use to be with one of your competitors, because remember we have to be smart. So develop you advertising material to target both competitors client and brand new clients.

The idea of the marketing campaign should be to fill the spaces where clients leaving your business left gapes on your books. Thus trying to maintain the size of your business as well as growing it. I think this is where business owner so often makes the mistake instead of keeping the marketing budget as it is and cutting from other budgets the marketing budget is so often the first to go.

This does not how ever mean that you have to go and invest a great deal of money in advertising what it does mean though is time. Invest some of your time every day in marketing your business and only invest the money your business can afford to invest in you marketing campaigns. There are several ways to do this but the cheapest and unfortunately most time consuming one would be the internet.

The internet is a great marketing platform and would well be your cheapest option if your marketing budget was already tight before everything but as I mentioned earlier this needs a serious time investment.
So now the question is how to incorporate the internet into my marketing strategy lets assume your business already have a website. What you will do now is take the time and register your business on as many business directories as possible some have the option of free adds other you have to pay for it, I will advises you to take some paid adds as these normally produces the best results. In this process you not only broaden your marketing plan but also better your web page ranking on search engines making the chances of new clients coming across your web site in there searches better. Web forums are another fantastic way to build your business and get more inbound links back to your site. Marketing on web forums is done by posting quality posts and then replying to the questions people ask with the expertise you have on the subject. Although direct advertising is usually not allowed its still a very good opportunity to grow your business and bring new clients in. This allow you to build a trusted professional relationship with potential clients this also gives you the chances to show how competent you are in the field assuring the client of a quality product or service before the deal is sighed.

A slowing economy leaves all consumers and business owner at a cross road make sure you are at the crosser road marketing you product before the bulk of consumers have passed.