Should you continue promoting your company in a business downturn? Of course you should, even if it has to be at a reduced level, because a dip in the market is the easiest time to increase market share, history has taught us that. But should your marketing message change? In Ten Tips for Effective Creative in Difficult Times on the B2B Insights Blog it’s suggested that you make more effort to understand the situation in which your customers find themselves (and I should add that their situation might just be “Crisis? What Crisis?”). In addition, reduced resources might mean you have to get to the point more quickly - and, to borrow a grammatically-challenged slogan from Apple, you need to Think Different.

I like analogies, and I especially like them when the analogy is something closely related. In Web Site as Trade Show? on the B2B Insights Blog, author Russ Green looks at the extent to which most of us will go to make an exhibition stand work, and then asks if we “put the same amount of effort and investment into creating a great web site experience for customers and prospects”.

Best of all, however, he touches on all the elements of a successful exhibition stand, and discusses how each of these has an analogy in your website. My own approach might be to get someone junior to attend your next exhibition, and create a series of pen pictures of actual visitors to the stand. Then, afterwards, discuss each of these real visitors (their nationality, requirements, urgency, etc) and see how your website would have dealt with them should they have taken that route.