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Abby Coplan of HRS says marketers need to roll-up their sleeves and do more so they can spend less.

Last week, Mike Schouten of Ingenix shared his perspective of yearly planning within a large health B2B marketing organization. This week, I wanted to give voice to the smaller organizations. So I asked my friend Abby Coplan, marketing director for the coding, auditing and outsourcing company HRS, to offer her take on marketing planning. As you’ll see from the interview, Abby is dynamic and opinionated, and she does a great job of helping her company succeed in a competitive market.

Full disclosure: HRS contracts with my agency, Lumeno Marketing.

Don Seamons: You work for a company that could be termed as a “Mom and Pop” business. Describe some of the give-and-take that you experience as you plan for next year.

Abby Coplan: Well, first of all, it’s a “Mom” shop. It’s a woman-owned, woman-run company, and that makes a huge difference in terms of our culture. We’ve been around a long time and we’ve been successful.

In terms of us being a smaller company, our budget is smaller, but I make every effort to make each dollar go as far as possible. I would also say that because we’re a small company, we can adapt quickly. There aren’t a lot of layers that we have to go through to make decisions. I can go right to the top. I have immediate access to the decision maker.

Don: What are some of the benefits of yearly planning in a small business?

Abby: Things aren’t as segmented in a small business, whereas in a larger company, things can be compartmentalized. Sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, which I ran into at previous positions I held.

When you work in a small company, you have to be willing to do more than just your job. That’s part of the fun and that’s part of what makes it tougher for some people, but I happen to like working in a small company. I like being involved in both the details and the big picture. Also, at a small company you have to be willing to do all sorts of work no matter what your title. I might be the marketing director, but you can bet that I’m there moving tables and putting together our booth or whatever is needed at the time. Because we are doing the work ourselves, we take a great amount of pride in our projects.

Another aspect of planning in a small business is the opportunity to be involved in the actual success or failure of the company. Marketing decisions directly affect the bottom line, and in a small company, those decisions can affect a bigger piece of the pie.

Don: You’re competing with bigger companies that presumably have bigger budgets. How do you counteract the advantages that your competitors may have?

Abby: I would say that I don’t think about trying to compete with the big guys. One of our advantages is that we’re not the big guy. On the other hand, you can’t act like they’re not there. But I think by focusing on what we do and on the factors that make us different, it’s the best way to bring out who we are. To try and beat 3M or Nuance, that would be wasting money and we can’t afford to do that. Plus, it almost doesn’t matter how big the budget is if you can create a marketing plan and a brand that is true to who you are as a company.

Don: How do you go about choosing the right marketing tactics?

Abby: I choose based on our past experience and the mileage we’ve gotten out of previous tactics. And we try to assess new opportunities that are available. I will say that I don’t just do that on my own. Wendy (Coplan-Gould, HRS’s president and founder) has long and deep expertise in this business and I try to use her as much as possible to get more information. She’s not a marketer, but she knows the market, and I try to pick her brain. I would say that I use Lumeno Marketing as a resource as well. We’re an outsourcing company, and we use outsourcing, too. To get expertise that augments our own is of value to us.

Even though I’m the marketing director, I don’t make the decisions on my own. We try and gather information from as many places as we can to make a good decision. Sometimes we need to make really hard choices to stay within the budget. We don’t have money to waste. Every time we’re making a marketing decision, we’re making an investment.

Don: Do you have any advice for other marketing directors who want to do more with less?

Abby: Don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves. You have to do more with less money and make it work for you. There might be some actual elbow grease that you have to exert. And be prepared to make difficult decisions, because no one has an unlimited budget.

Don: What’s your favorite money-saving idea?

Abby: Be creative. A creative idea doesn’t have to cost a lot. Several of the promotions that we used at this year’s AHIMA show didn’t cost much, but it seemed to me like our audience appreciated the thought of a good idea. If you can take a creative idea from concept to execution to fruition, people will react to that.

Photo credit: Jennifer König (cc)

Read More: http://healthb2bmarketing.com/2010/10/marketing-leader-in-a-small-health-b2b-company-do-more-with-less/