In these cash-tight times, marketing budgets and brand-building activities are often the first cost centers to get the ax. But doing so can have serious ramifications for your business - today and in the future.

Customers and prospects have very short memories. If you’re not staying in front of them in multiple ways, you’ll be quickly forgotten once the economy brightens and competitors move in.

For franchise businesses, branding and marketing challenges are twofold: Maintain awareness of the overall brand while helping the growth of individual franchisees. Both of those tasks get a lot tougher when there’s less money with which to work.

But a down economy also presents opportunities to strengthen your brand and stay top-of-mind with customers. To help you get the most from your marketing dollars in these trying times, here are five brand-building tips to consider:

Right now, many organizations are doing away with or significantly reducing brand-building activities and instead investing in activities that more directly influence sales of products or services. And while these activities aren’t mutually exclusive, shutting off brand-building activities can be a tragic mistake for franchise businesses.

Brand recognition and integrity are vital to a franchise’s success. A solid brand is a living, breathing entity that has been carefully crafted over time. It sets customer expectations for your organization, earns their loyalty and, in some cases, may earn your organization a price premium. If your brand isn’t consistently supported, it will be quickly forgotten.

The good news is that your competitors are facing the same dilemmas, so evaluate your current branding strategies with an eye toward making your marketing dollars go as far as possible. One opportunity is to fill those channels your competitors are leaving, such as direct mail and broadcast media. You can often score media buys at a discount, and even modest investment can reap big rewards: Once the economy brightens and competitors rush back, customers will already be familiar with you.

Online banner ads are another brand-building medium franchises may want to leverage. As with other online marketing strategies, banner ads allow you to target customers to a much greater degree than is possible with offline channel.s

Banner ads can be paired with customized landing pages to create a positive brand experience at every click. Landing pages are typically developed to generate a specific action step for the viewer, such as filling out a form to receive a coupon or joining a loyalty or rewards program.

When backed by targeted landing pages, banner ads can help turn clicks into customers, offering almost immediate ROI calculations. And today’s media-buying technology allows you to identify and target very specific online audiences with relevant content to maximize results even further. Of course, the ultimate goal is to drive that interested visitor to become a real customer. By combining banner ads and corresponding landing pages with other communications and the right creative elements, you compel customers to take action both online and offline.

When the proverbial wheels come off the economy, it’s time to refocus your branding and marketing initiatives on core customers - the lifeblood of your business. There are several strategies that can help you do this effectively. First, be sure all of your brand-building initiatives reinforce your key value propositions with this audience. Stick with the differentiating statements with which your customers have become familiar; moving your brand promise in a new direction may confuse your customers and make it more difficult to maintain or expand those relationships going forward.

If you haven’t yet implemented a loyalty or customer rewards program, now may be a great time to do so. To be effective, the components of your loyalty program - such as discounts on products and services or access to special events or content - must be relevant to your organization’s brand philosophy and value proposition, and present real value to customers.

Loyalty programs are one area where it’s acceptable to slightly shift your messaging and tactics to reflect current market realities - as long as you aren’t diluting your brand in the process. The goal of any loyalty program is to make sure your core customers feel loved by your organization - and to give them some incentive to love you back in good times and bad.

Now may be the perfect time to dive into local search to attract online users right in your backyard. Local search refers to geographically-specific search queries that look for matching business listings. So if someone conducts a search for “Pet Grooming Alexandria” and your pet grooming franchise has a location there, local search makes it much more likely your location will appear in the search results.

Local search doesn’t happen automatically. Identify the local search engines your customers and prospects use most (Yahoo! and Google both have local search components) and update your business listings to reflect locations, products and services, contact information and more.

The Web is no longer a novelty channel favored by a subset of your customers. It is the platform for interactive customer engagement and building brand loyalty. According the Pew Internet & American Life project, 81% of Internet users go online to research products or services before they buy.

That means your Web site is not just another place to reinforce your brand; an online experience that goes beyond typical metrics such as page views and unique visitors should be front and center in your brand identity strategy.

Fifteen seconds and one click. That’s all the time Web users will give your site if you don’t clearly articulate a key message to them. Keep visitors on your site and encourage them to dig deeper by creating a compelling online brand experience. Users are closer than ever to the Web – every aspect of advertising is built to drive users to a Web site. The more compelling the experience, the more likely you are to convert visitors into customers.

From a creative standpoint, there are countless ways to accomplish this. A campaign mini-site is an increasingly popular tactic that allows you to rapidly produce an online branded experience in support of a marketing message.

Think of a mini-site as an expanded landing page; it mimics the look and feel of your main Web site and other collateral as a means of reinforcing your brand while containing more specialized content.

The value of a mini-site is its flexibility. It can include viral and community elements, such as online games and a blog, that beg repeated visits and interaction, or it can be a simple and straightforward tool for rapidly delivering a useful message that drives users to make a purchase.

The beauty of the Web is the ability to infinitely track its performance, which is why 'click-through rates" and "cost per click" metrics have entered our daily marketing lexicon. The ability to calculate ROI and adjust budgets of competing search marketing campaigns helps you maximize every dollar you invest in this medium.

Customer feedback should be a key component of your online testing protocol. Have a new banner ad campaign? Give customers an opportunity to comment on it directly on your Web site.

The economy - and your competitors - can change directions in an instant. By soliciting feedback and combining it with the proper campaign results metrics and data, you can constantly improve on the quality and overall perception of your brand and marketing programs - today and in the future.