The Technology Sector Is Struggling According To Survey Results
There was recently a survey carried out by one of the UKs leading sales and marketing advisors regarding the marketing strategies of the UKs smaller, owner-managed technology businesses, and the results were somewhat surprising.
Overall, the 2009 technology sales and marketing survey found that for the most part, smaller, owner-managed technology companies in the UK arent helping themselves as much as they could be doing in these adverse economic times.
The survey contained five main questions and was filled out by 176 small UK technology businesses. It was designed to measure the affect of the recession on their businesses to find out how they planned to market themselves in the coming year. Everyone who filled the form out expected a fall in turnover, the vast majority were going to be looking for new customers and most of them were expecting around a quarter of their sales to come from these new customers.
It appears to be the web service providers who are suffering the most in these harsh times as these are the ones who have cut the most staff and have cut most money from their marketing plans. This demonstrates short sightedness on their part as it has been shown from the last time the country was in recession that the companies that keep up effective marketing campaigns will be at the top of the pile when the economy stabilises itself.
You can also see from the results of this survey that a lot of these technology businesses are shying away from technological methods of marketing such as online marketing and are relying more or less solely on the personal approach, quoting referrals as their most used marketing method.
Strangely enough, it seems that the technology companies are the ones shying away from the Internet, even though it is almost an easy way out, IT marketing solutions can be introduced very quickly. Of course personal contacts should not simply be forgotten about, but especially in these difficult times companies cannot shut out other marketing options.
So the main finding from this survey was that a lot of these technology companies are drastically cutting their spend on marketing, even though we can see from past recessions that the companies who carry on marketing themselves will some out on top in the future.