Interesting advice at Brand Republic today for marketers as recession looms.  The overwhelming feeling of hang-on-in-there and don’t cut for the sake of it comes through loud and clear.  Brendan Condon of Platform-A summed up why beautifully: Consumers are still living and breathing and they still need to buy products.  David Roddick (Northcliffe Media) added that marketers need to make sure they’re “absolutely focused on delivering value”.  Hear, hear.

My advice? Don’t slash budgets for the sake of it, look to streamline wherever possible, and use decent measurement to make sure every single penny is working its socks off for you.  PR works well in these times, as long as it’s working hard.  Here’s how we are helping our clients to beat the credit crunch:

1. Get PR measurement agencies like Metrica to earn their money: ask us to lead an audit of everything your company is doing in measurement and help you streamline it.  Eradicate duplication, it’s costly and useless
2. Use proper PR planning and media consumption research like Metrica’s UKPulse to ensure you are best reaching your target audience and not wasting money using the scatter gun approach.  Understanding exactly what media your audience is consuming is essential
3. Stop trying to measure the universe – every hit does not count!  Metrica has some great knowledge—gained from running global PR measurement programmes—of how to best identify the respresentative sample of media that matters.  Cut down on your cutting agency bills – the media universe is only expanding which means so too will your press cutting bills
4. We are supplying many of our clients with online only coverage solutions.  It’s a massively cost effective approach which still gives valid insights into the media.  It’s certainly not suitable for everyone but is something for PR departments feeling to sqeeze to seriously consider.  Why keep paying swollen cuttings bills when online content is so readily available?
5. Get Metrica to help you devise real, achievable metrics that resonate in your boardroom, gain you kudos and really demonstrate the fruits of your labour.  Warning for AVE dependents – these are going down in value as time goes by and this trend looks set to continue.  You’ll have to keep working harder and harder to get the same result

Encouragingly, many clients I speak to are having to deal with frozen budgets rather than the reductions that their advertising counterparts are.  As long as we lean up, and get proper metrics in place to prove our worth, I would bet my bottom dollar that PR can hold onto the budgets it deserves.