According to a survey by the World Federation of Advertisers of 43 multinational companies, nearly 30% of advertisers say they’re reducing their ad budgets. 74% of these advertisers say that the economic downturn has led them to make these decisions. Contrary to the growth forecast of 2%, the US GDP rose at 1.1% in the first quarter of 2023, which shows that the US economy is slowing down. Despite the promising growth forecast, the recession scenario can’t be ruled out when other persistent issues, like interest hikes, rising inflation, etc., are considered. Marketers need to have a plan & strategy when marketing in a recession. You can read our blogs on ‘Digital ad spending forecast for the US market in 2023’ and ‘UK digital ad spending forecast 2023’ to know more about the impact of the recession that marketers have to face. In this blog, let us discuss the essential marketing strategies during a recession that helps in lead generation, optimizing conversion rate, etc.
Why should you continue marketing during a recession?
There are many scenarios that marketers have to go through, like dealing with the pandemic Coronavirus, cross-border wars, economic slowdown, etc. Adjusting digital marketing strategies in sync with marketing trends is essential to achieve the desired results in a recession. Online marketers need to gear up to face the brunt of the recession. When you continue marketing during a recession, the user's trust in your business increases. From a business perspective, when you continue marketing during a recession, it shows that your business offerings are always there for the users and the business thinks from the user's perspective. It helps gain new users and retain existing users with your business in the long run.
Tips for marketing during a recession
1. Focus on retaining existing clients -The essential point for marketing during a recession is to focus on retaining existing clients. In the world of digital marketing, it is vital to focus on the latest trends in digital marketing to achieve the desired goals. It is always good to have increased website traffic for your business as this helps to build brand awareness, increase conversion rate, etc.
Whether you are running paid ad campaigns, SEO campaigns, email marketing campaigns, content marketing campaigns, etc., you must focus on retaining existing clients. It is always good to have new clients for your website so that more users know about your business offerings. You can convert visitors into customers by offering them the best products or services. You need to ensure that users navigate through different sections on the webpage to spend more time on the page, increasing the chances of the users taking the desired action on the landing page.
2. Analyze past and current performance metrics -When marketing during the recession, the best strategy to focus on is to analyze the past and current performance metrics. As marketing trends keep evolving with the changes in users' buying activity, marketers need to work on plans & strategies in sync with these changes to keep the users' trust engaged with your business.
To keep the users engaged with the product or services your business provides, you need to analyze the past and current metrics that matter most for your business. As in search engine optimization, you prepare an SEO report or outsource SEO services so that the SEO professionals work on preparing the data-driven report and highlight the performance of essential SEO metrics. When you outsource SEO reports to a white label SEO company, they present you with the performance of the critical metrics that matter the most to your business. Similarly, when the best marketing tip that matters the most to your business is that you need to analyze past and current performance metrics regularly. When you analyze the performance of these metrics in the past and at times of recession, you will see a significant change.
There may be high-quality website traffic; users would be spending more time on the page, etc. But with the recession hitting the target audience's buying capacity, businesses suffer. So, when marketing during a recession, it is essential to analyze many of the things like advertising spending in a recession, marketing spending in recession, etc.
The recession market provides marketers and agencies with the opportunity with many opportunities like increasing branded traffic, working on customer retention & acquisition strategies, increasing organic traffic, etc. Businesses can target users that did not convert into customers due to one reason or other. You need to analyze the essential PPC metrics, SEO KPIs, e-commerce metrics, social media metrics, etc., that matter the most for your business.
3. Focus on content marketing -When marketing during a recession, you need to focus on content marketing. As during times of recession, content marketing helps businesses inform the users about their product or service offerings. It is the prime method of communication between businesses and the target audience during the recession. You need to ensure that you write great content so that the users' interest in your business offerings increases.
Content marketing is one of the essential methods of marketing as the users are informed about the products or services that your business offers. As you have the most impatient users today that do not wait long for desired results, it becomes vital to grab their attention and make them stay longer on the page. As in SEO, you outsource SEO audit, outsource video SEO, outsource enterprise SEO, etc., so that the SEO professionals work on optimizing the performance of essential SEO metrics and avoid any SEO mistakes. Similarly, you can outsource content marketing services and hire content specialists to write engaging content for your campaigns.
You need to ensure that you have great content for your paid ad campaigns, like writing engaging ad copies, ad descriptions, etc. Similarly, with SEO campaigns, you need to write engaging headlines, meta descriptions, title tags, etc., so that you have quality traffic to your website. The better the content, the higher the chances of the users engaging with the business. You need to ensure that you have a good page loading speed and ensure to convert the visitor to a customer.
4. Focus on unique selling proposition -The next essential point that you need to focus on when marketing during a recession is that you need to focus on a unique selling proposition. The online marketing world encompasses multiple users and the buying activity of the users varies. However, it is not possible to please every user. But, with white label SEO audit services, you can identify the unique selling proposition that the users are looking for when buying the products or services. When you outsource SEO services to a white label SEO reseller company, the SEO experts identify and present you with a unique selling proposition (USP) that increases the chances of the users taking the desired action.
As in a PPC ad campaign, you outsource PPC campaign analysis, outsource PPC keyword research services, outsource remarketing services, outsource PPC audit services, etc., so that the PPC consultants work on optimizing the performance of the PPC campaign. As PPC experts work on ad personalization so that the users feel that the ad is personalized for the keywords or search terms entered by the user. Similarly, you need to focus on targeting the unique selling proposition of the users to grab the users' attention to your brand name.
As during a recession, there are chances of sales of the businesses going down, so you need to focus on attracting the users with high chances of taking the desired action. Be it any form of marketing like email marketing campaigns, content marketing campaigns, when you focus on writing great content for the users, you need to ensure that it is personalized according to what the users are looking for.
5. Leverage social media platforms -The next essential marketing strategy during the recession is to leverage social media platforms. With nearly 4.9 billion users on social media platforms in 203 and expected to reach 5.85 billion by 2027, it is imperative to leverage social media platforms to target users on these platforms. The importance of social media platforms can be understood from the point that people in the U.S. have an average of 7.1 social media accounts. This states the importance of social media platforms in the online marketing world. Even in times of recession, it is vital to use social media marketing as the users are active on either one or the other social network.
Social media is becoming the need of the hour, not only for users but also for marketers. Today, the online marketing world being different from traditional marketing, requires the focus of online marketers to ensure that none of the relevant users are missed. You need to ensure that you not only run Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc. but also focus on running paid ad campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc. This increases your online presence and more users see your ad. You also need to regularly keep updating the social media post so that the users have the latest information about the product offerings.
6. Build brand awareness -The next marketing tip during a recession is to focus on building brand awareness. When marketing during a recession, there are high chance that the users choose the business offerings that already have established their name in the market. However, this does not mean that users would not avail the product or services of other brands. It means that the chances of the users choosing other businesses than those popular in the market decrease. You also need to ensure that you build brand awareness on social media platforms so that your brand visibility increases.
It is essential to build brand awareness at times of recession so that the users are aware of your brand and do not have second thoughts about choosing your business offerings. When running paid ad campaigns, search engine optimization, etc., the goals of many businesses are to build brand awareness. Whether you are running local SEO services ads or local SEO campaigns, it is vital to target users locally, as during times of recession, users may be looking for products or services locally. Some of the ways to build brand awareness are listed below.
a. Creating a custom hashtag for social media platforms.
b. Leverage SEO strategy for social media platforms like YouTube SEO, Facebook SEO, etc.
c. Run display ads on the Google Display Network.
When marketing during a recession, having better brand awareness for your business helps increase online sales. You may have a downfall in revenue for your business, but focusing on core business helps more & more users to know about your product offerings. You need to ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices, has good page loading speed, and that the redirects (if any, like 302 redirects, 303 redirects, etc.) are working fine. Some of the benefits of building brand awareness for your business are.
1. It builds trust among the target audience.
2. Promotes customer loyalty.
3. Gives your brand personality.
4. Helps in peer-to-peer marketing.
5. Promotes your business on social media platforms.
7. Focus on long-term goals -The next essential point when marketing during a recession is that you need to focus on long-term goals. Situations like the Coronavirus pandemic and recessions in the market do not last forever. So, it is vital not to panic during these situations and focus on long-term goals. It may be hard for you to achieve the desired marketing goals during the recession period as you may experience an ad budget getting drained on irrelevant clicks, you may see your website traffic dropping, etc. The marketing spend during recession changes but advertisers need to focus on long-term goals so that when the economic condition stabilizes users click on your ads. So, this is when you start focusing on optimizing the other competitive metrics so that they yield the desired result when the situation returns to normal.
8. Have a plan to evaluate ROI -The essential point to market in a recession is to have a plan to evaluate ROI for your business. Be it any form of digital marketing like running PPC ad campaigns, using search engine optimization techniques to optimize the website's performance, running email marketing campaigns, performing content marketing, etc.; it is quite vital to have a plan to evaluate ROI. The recession marketing strategy that all-size businesses must focus on is having the plan to evaluate ROI.
Marketing spend in a recession keeps fluctuating drastically and there may be a great surge in the advertising budget or marketing spend and may not yield the desired results. So, it is essential to evaluate the ROI that informs you of the changes your business experiences during a recession. When advertising during a recession you may be running display ads, local service ads, search ads, mobile ads, video ads, etc., to get in touch with the users locally. But with recession in market, you may see a downfall in the number of users using these services. You can also outsource go to market strategy, market research services, etc, so that the market experts focus on analyzing the market situation and then make best plans during recession in market. So, the best marketing tip during a recession is that you can lure these users into clicking on your ad by providing them with offers & discounts. This increases the chances of the users taking the desired action.
How recession affects marketing?
A recession impacts marketing as users buying activity changes. However, businesses must maintain sales to stay afloat. So, during the recession, marketing strategies change with changes in the economic environment. Whether advertising in a recession or running SEO campaigns, marketers need to adapt to changes in recession to maximize the return on investment. Online marketers need to be updated with the changes in the digital marketing world, like marketing in the Metaverse, responsive search ads becoming the default type for expanded text ads, etc. Similarly, at times of recession, marketers need to gear up with their marketing strategy to meet the users' needs. With changing scenarios, the marketing strategies need to be changed so that brands can be more cautious due to price sensitivity and adapt to changes during this time on how people spend their money.
Conclusion
Marketing strategies during a recession is essential as it helps to ensure that you target the relevant prospects to your business. The best marketing tips during the recession are discussed above in the blog and require a flexible mindset to maximize the results with your marketing results. When the marketing strategies are best implemented, you present your business as trustworthy and the user's trust in your brand increases.
As discussed above, marketing agencies can help businesses sail their business growth through a recession. Online marketing professionals dive deep into understanding the business requirements and then implement the best plan & strategies. They even perform a/b testing and avoid black-hat SEO techniques that impact the website negatively. If you find marketing during a recession a tough task to implement, you can outsource a digital marketing company and get the work done by professionals. The marketing experts have holistic and user-friendly strategies that help businesses achieve their desired business goals. You can also avail of offshore digital marketing services as the professionals have experience in website conversion analysis, competition analysis, digital analytics, etc. and help companies maximize ROI during the recession. By hiring our digital marketing experts from our marketing agency you can avail various services for your business like painting SEO, HVAC SEO, plumbing SEO, appliance repair SEO, construction SEO and much more. Our agency is well versed in providing these services at much ease and comfort to their clients globally and taking their business to a new level.
References:
• Marketing during a recession (with 10 key strategy tips)
• Surviving a recession with a strong marketing strategy