Now more than ever brands need to create their own recovery

Last month the newly established Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reduced UK growth projections right through to 2014 and George Osborne delivered his emergency austerity budget; both served to confirm that businesses in the private sector will have to create their own recovery.

Quite rightly many businesses will look to their marketing agencies and suppliers to help them define strategies and tactics that can drive forward their recovery, helping them to take market share whilst other brands are still looking inwards or very tentatively feeling their way out. But how well equipped are these agencies to offer the deep-seated and highly integrated marketing strategies that will be required to germinate and nurture sustainable growth in the face of rising unemployment, pay freezes, new taxes and fragile demand.

I think that there are 10 steps that client businesses should be taking right now to create their own recovery and they should be working with agencies that can successfully deliver all of them together, tightly joined up.

My 10 Steps to create your own recovery are:

1. Identify and target your most far-sighted, confident and economically insulated customers and prospects, as they will lead sales growth in many categories.
2. Dynamically refresh your targeting and segmentation models to reflect new market realities and drivers - don't let them lose their predictive power and efficacy due to changed conditions and behaviours.
3. Dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your paid search (PPC) activity by understanding the true value of every click and thereby free up budget to invest in boosting recovery.
4. Sensitively commercialise your use of social media channels rather than see it as a soft R&D investment - or your competitors will get there before you.
5. Locate and convert pockets of stronger demand without sacrificing service quality, by tapping into flexible outsourced telesales expertise - don't wait to rebuild your headcount and internal call capacity, it'll be too late.
6. Maximise revenues from existing customers by integrating multiple online and offline data feeds to optimise customer contact in real time.
7. Retain your existing customers more successfully by "lab testing" potential improvements to the customer journey or revised sales processes without having to disentangle existing infrastructures.
8. Get the most you can from your test and learn strategies, which become ever more important in tough and changing times like these. Make sure that they are well prioritised, statistically robust and use strong forecasting tools so that outcomes can be called early and acted upon.
9. Build a standing online research community to feed your thinking about emerging consumer mind states and how these should influence engagement strategies.
10. Make sure that throughout everything you monitor precisely the right metrics to evaluate and predict your own recovery and not just that of the sector or the UK economy at large.

It is the brands that sow the right seeds, in the right places, that will see green shoots grow into enhanced market share or leadership. Few agencies are equipped to look at things as deeply as is required or join the implementation up as tightly as is needed - make sure that your's is one of them.