Nobody likes to say the 'R' word. But, they are a fact of life.
In America, a recession seems to hit once every 5 years since 1945 — and they were even more common before that. In the UK, the trend has been that they occur at least once a decade. Marketing budgets are often the first thing to get cut during a downturn. But effective marketing strategies have been key to past rebounds in every sector.
Volatility is just as much of an opportunity as it is a challenge -- marketers need to remember that. In this guide, we’ll explore how you can manage your marketing budget through any crisis, and help ensure that you’re perfectly placed to take full advantage of the recovery.
In each section we will cover:
• Section One: How to sell to someone who doesn't want to be sold to
• Section Two: How to refine your marketing strategy with limited budget
• Section Three: How to recession-proof your marketing budget ahead of time
Section One: How to sell to someone who doesn't want to be sold to
It’s an unfortunate fact of any crisis — sales leads start drying up, conversations that were taking place are put on hold, and suddenly everything starts looking a little bit bleak. But it’s important to remember that the uncertain times ahead won’t last forever.
Now is not the time to feel sorry for yourself, it’s time to take action and set yourself up for the recovery. Timing is everything Rule number one of any B2B marketing strategy in a time of crisis: think before you act. In marketing, timing is everything, and it’s crucial that you are sensitive to the situation that your prospects have found themselves in.
During economic hardship, no business wants to be bombarded with messaging that’s trying to make them part with their hard-earned (and now limited) cash. But it’s essential that your brand remains front of mind for when the time is right. So how do you ultimately sell to someone that doesn’t want to be sold to? Content really is king You start selling your brand, rather than your product — simply put, you invest in content marketing.
Through a solid content strategy, you can target prospects and build up a top of the funnel database that you can start nurturing with content. By executing this strategy, you’ll be able to initiate SEC: 01 sales conversations when the recovery begins, while your competitors are still trying to get the leads in the first place.
By creating relevant and timely resources, like the guide you’re reading now, you can educate prospects around their problems and pain points, all the time while subtly selling your brand. Educational content builds trust and authority in a brand, so when the time is right for prospects to start considering purchase options, your product is the one that’s top of the list.
Spend now so you don’t have to later
Social media advertising platforms such as LinkedIn are the perfect vehicle for the promotion of your educational resources. You can use various tools such as sponsored posts, inMails, even conversational ads to drive top of the funnel leads.
Ensure your messaging is relevant to the audience, content and the current climate — but remember to stay sensitive and avoid a sales-like approach. Ultimately, during uncertainty you should focus the majority of your marketing budget into promoting content, rather than sales conversions.
Investing now will give you the luxury of spending less later while keeping you ‘front and centre’ in the eyes of your target market audience. But what should you do if your ad spend has been slashed?
Section Two: How to refine your marketing strategy with limited budget
Outbound prospecting
Marketing is one of the first functions to take a budgetary hit in a downturn. Although this is understandable, it can also make matters worse. Just like buying stocks right after a crash, maintaining a strong marketing presence throughout a recession will put you on a strong footing to take advantage of the eventual recovery.
The choice to maintain ad-spend during uncertain times, however, isn’t always up to the marketing team. It can be hard to justify expenditures if it How to refine your marketing strategy with limited budget isn’t directly resulting in conversions, and few people make luxury, expensive or long-term purchases during a recession, so if it can be put off until better times, most businesses will opt to do that.
Double-down on marketing (but in the right areas)
Sometimes the budget really isn’t there, and if businesses are forced to choose between maintaining services or promoting products, they have to choose the former. What you need instead is an advertising strategy that doesn’t disappear right when you stop actively spending money on it.
What you need is inbound content marketing! Luckily, this is a strategy that will help you gain business in ‘bear’ and ‘bull’ markets. It is part of any serious marketer’s playbook. It just so turns out that proper investment in a content marketing strategy will help you weather a recession more easily than your competitors and prepare for any future market downturns.
The market staying power of quality content
We mentioned earlier that ‘content is king’, and this is a phrase that gets bandied about in inbound circles. There are a lot of reasons for this — content fits into the changing demands of buyers liberated by the internet, it helps and informs, it positions your firm positively in the minds of customers. The secret weapon of content, however, is that it doesn’t go away — in fact, it gets stronger.
The longer content is online, the higher it drifts in SEO ranking. The more site visits, external links, likes, shares and comments you garner, the more likely it becomes that other people will find your work. A genuine content marketing strategy will be ongoing, and posting regularly keeps your site ‘active’ and helps SEO. But, content is the gift that keeps on giving. You only pay for it once.
A few quality articles can create the backbone of a self-sustaining web of content that will generate leads for years to come. The key to this is quality. You need content that speaks to your buyers and delivers valuable and relevant information. This means not only publishing new content, but updating older content to remain useful and relevant. In fact, Google’s May 2020 core update means that it’s algorithm favours quality content over articles that are keyword-stuffed, and is putting increasing value on regularly updated content.
When planning for a recession, this is the most valuable move you can make right now. A substructure of quality content won't go anywhere even if budgetary cuts means you have to stop posting temporarily. Unlike pay-per-click (PPC) ad-buy, content generates its own organic footprint that you don’t have to pay for. It will keep you front of mind and ready for prospect customers whatever the circumstances.
Content lets you expand your web presence and attract buyers who are seeking to educate themselves about complex products prior to purchase. According to research by CEB and Google, B2B buyers have already completed 57% of their purchase journey before ever contacting a supplier.
Think about the last time you bought anything, did you go rushing to speak with a salesperson? Without content, you are nearly excluded from the modern buyer’s journey. Every conceivable question a prospective buyer might have about your product should be answered in detail on your website. FAQ and product pages are part of that delivery. But, blogs often provide a better medium through which to deliver answers. In order to cast a wide net, you need to go beyond answering direct questions about your product and provide answers about your industry. If you can help people do things for themselves, it will only improve your company’s standing in the eyes of prospect buyers.
You might lose a few customers to DIY, but anyone looking for real expertise will be able to see that you are the real deal. That is who you want as a client anyway. Blogs remove the pressure associated with sales and the contrivance of product pages.
They are a long-form platform to dive into the depth required to really supply added value to the reader. Your ability to deliver that will not only draw in traffic, it will improve conversions. The fact that quality content is an investment in the future is an added benefit that turns content marketing from a tactic into a long-term strategy.
Section Three: How to recession-proof your marketing budget ahead of time
The basics of content marketing come down to understanding your products and your customers. You have to think about what you sell, what people want to know about that service or product and how they are likely to search for those answers. You should subdivide your target market audience into distinct ‘personas’, all of whom are potential buyers or influencers that can help you make a sale.
For B2B businesses, this should be done in the context of a broader account-based marketing (ABM) strategy. However, in order to get even more precise about personas, think about these questions in the context of the ‘B2B buyer’s journey’. This is the process that buyers go through as they become aware of, evaluate and then purchase a product or service. This is generally subdivided into three stages:
1. Awareness: is when a prospect is first investigating an issue. They are looking to solve a problem, find answers or meet a need. They want high-level information that can get them pointed in the right direction.
2. Consideration: is when a potential customer has defined their problem and is looking for specific information to solve it. They want more detailed information roadmapping actionable solutions.
3. Decision: is when a prospect has made a decision on the solution they need and is looking for the right product to provide that solution.
You need to craft content marketing targeted at each persona for each stage of the B2B buyer’s journey. There will be some crossover, just as there will be a crossover between personas. For example, what you are reading right now is content marketing, you are likely to be a senior marketing professional or a small to medium sized business owner (two different personas) who is looking to safeguard their brand awareness in the event of a recession.
You are looking to solve a problem and we are providing a high level answer to that issue — placing you in the awareness stage of the journey. However, this guide has crossed over into providing some detail on how to create an actionable solution and could act to confirm a decision that you have already made.