Faced with a recession, many business owners are in a state of panic. And why not? A company’s marketing campaign is one of its most expensive things to maintain.
While small businesses were shaken up during the pandemic, some strong marketing trends emerged that can help you “recession proof” your business.
Here are six strategies for creating a mature marketing strategy to reach your customers.
Niche Down and Identify Your Audience’s Core Pain Points
When a crisis or economic downturn hits, the first thing you need to do is reevaluate your customer personas. What are their pain points? Have their needs changed?
The more intimately you can understand your customer, the better you can tailor your products and services.
This personalization will lead to a more loyal customer base and minimize the need for heavy marketing. If needed, you can re-energize your campaign messaging to better streamline your sales funnel.
The more targeted you can get with your customer base, the easier it will be to find them online.
Create Incentives or Discounts
Another marketing strategy you can implement is creating incentives and discounts. In a recession, it’s important to stay competitive. If you have some wiggle room in your campaign budget, adding incentives or discounts can help keep customers on board while saving money through decreased customer acquisition costs.
Incentives and deals are easy ways to offset the effect of financial downturns. This way, even though business isn’t going as planned – at least revenue is still being generated from shoppers looking for great deals over this period of time!
Another tactic may work well when marketing is stagnating is to incentivize your customers to buy more frequently.
If you have a product or service that can be bought in small quantities, this marketing strategy will definitely come in handy! By creating incentives for bulk purchases from individual consumers, businesses are able to make up the difference on their marketing budget while generating consistent revenue and minimizing customer churn rates.
Invest in Your Audience’s Core Digital Platforms
Many small businesses feel overwhelmed trying to reach their audiences across the constantly expanding number of platforms. Instead of looking at 10+ social platforms, focus on the two or three where your audience spends the most time.
It’s a lot easier to maintain and invest in one or two reliable platforms compared to the time investment needed for multiple channels.
Once you’ve found your strongest digital platform(s), focus on creating valuable content that will keep users engaged. This could be anything from blog posts to videos – whatever resonates best with your audience. Make sure that this content lives up to industry standards by putting yourselves in the shoes of potential consumers: what information would they look for? What type of product reviews do they need? How can we help them succeed through our products/services?
The more value-driven and authentic your brand is perceived as being, the more trust your audience will have in you. And if they trust you, they’ll be more likely to buy from you!
Creating an editorial calendar is another great way to market during economic downturns. This strategy should include: what topics you plan on writing about, who the target audience for each blog post or video is and when specific posts/videos are scheduled to go live (ex: first week of every month).
This planning process helps ensure that all content has continuity throughout the year while catering specifically to user needs at different times of the year – like Christmas shopping versus summer vacation season. By having this sorta roadmap laid out ahead of time, it’s easy for marketers and small business
Create Unique Experiences that People Want to Talk About
A long-term marketing strategy is encouraging word of mouth–customers sharing their experiences with their networks. As a business, you’re able to encourage social sharing by creating a unique customer experience that people want to talk about.
This is a great way to increase your brand’s visibility and expand your market share.
The word ‘budget’ typically brings about feelings like stress and panic, but creating unique experiences are oftentimes one-time costs that you can capitalize on for years to come. These investments in your marketing strategy will pay off both short and long term.
When it comes to creating experiences, you’ll need to get creative. Think novelty
An example of a business that capitalized on this marketing strategy was the Museum of Ice Cream. This pop-up museum was only offered in New York City for a limited time, but it’s popularity resulted in $15 million ticket sales!
You don’t need to invest in an entire popup to sell products or services, but brainstorm a unique experience you can create that will make your customer say, “wow, that was cool!”
Establish Strong B2B Partnerships
Business-to-business partnerships are a great way to generate leads during economic downturns. Businesses can partner up with complementary partners that offer products or services that could benefit their customers/clients..
The partnership needs to be beneficial for both businesses, so make sure the time commitment is well worth it! If you ‘re a small business, you might want to consider partnering with an influencer who has a large social following.
This is great for outreach because the influencers’ networks will trust what they have to say about your brand–which could lead to sales! In addition, this type of partnership can oftentimes be mutually beneficial by offering value-added services for your customers.
Since partnering can result in a huge spike of traffic to your site, have pre-built landing pages ready for when the partnership goes live. This way, you’re able to convert visitors into leads and drive them towards purchasing products or services.
Establishing strong business partnerships is one of the best ways to take care of your customers and generate leads during economic downturns. This strategy has the potential to help boost sales in a big way.
Test and Optimize Digital Ads
During a pandemic, many consumers spend far more time online than in person. Now is the right time for you to begin testing and optimizing digital ads for your small business.
Test banner sizes, text copy, images/video to bring people into the landing page. You can also optimize ad spend by testing different audiences.
A great way to test ad copy is split testing. This allows you to see which versions of ads are performing better and what audiences click the most, so that your efforts aren’t being wasted with low-performing ads or copy. You can even use custom audiences created from customer lists you have access to.
You can also optimize your digital ads by using retargeting. By setting up custom audiences, you’re able to create similar customer lists and serve them highly targeted ads that will lead them back toward your brand. This ad strategy is a great way to increase your brand’s visibility and expand your customer base.
Key Takeaways
In summary, there are many ways for your business to stay afloat during economic downturns.
It all starts with understanding your customers on an intimate level and being able to offer unique experiences that will resonate with them. Reach them where they are, and once you find them, double down on your efforts.
