5 Tips To Prep Your Marketing For Recession.
Looking ahead toward a potential recession, businesses will aim to conserve budgets across marketing. The absolutely worst thing you can do in this position is to bury your head in the sand and cut marketing. Instead, look into how you can maintain or even increase the advertising budget, and get strategic about how you use it.
Whether you’re preparing for a recession, trying to improve profitability, or implementing a growth strategy of improved productivity, you can leverage the following five tips to help your business reduce wasteful spending, increase revenue and align spending to company objectives for growth.
1. Realign marketing goals to growth opportunities
Prioritize existing opportunities for growth and refine your strategy accordingly. It’s important to align with other revenue-engine functions in the business, such as sales and product, as you adjust your goals.
2. Redirect spending according to an up-to-date marketing plan
Continue to focus on core capabilities and balance long-term and short-term opportunities:
Adjust your marketing plan on a page to identify markets that should be harvested, paused, or exited. The goal is to intentionally redirect spend from those markets to growth markets.
Focus on what marketing will intentionally do and not do against updated goals and objectives. Documenting these decisions helps to clarify what’s expected from marketing.
Complete a keep, modify, create, or drop exercise for key marketing activities. Document and assess current and proposed marketing actions against your goals and the capacity to execute. Intentionally redirect spend from the drop list to the create or modify lists. During persona planning, determine persona preferences for tactic types; intentionally shift spend away from those interaction types they do not prefer.
3. Reallocate marketing investment and budget to reduce waste
Prioritize, shift, pause, or reduce investments. Review planned spend and renegotiate or pause contracts that no longer align with this year’s plan (see item 2 above).
Identify wasteful or duplicative spending. Take a look at your budget, look for duplicative spend, tactics out of alignment with campaigns or the overall marketing plan. Don’t cut across the board (i.e., 9% reduction across the board, pausing all marketing, or delaying all new tech investment). Be more strategic about cost reduction.
Allocate resources differently. Upskill and leverage current talent based on key actions identified in your marketing plan. Use agencies, outsourcing, or automation where appropriate.
4. Review and document marketing processes
Audit and document marketing processes and automation to support your business.
Complete business process audits to reduce waste. Assess your content engine to improve utilization and reduce internal touch points, and audit your campaign implementation process to reduce touch points for approvals.
Consider introducing or expanding agile marketing as a process methodology to drive quick wins.
5. Complete a marketing technology audit
Review your current martech stack to assess how well adopted it is and whether the full capability is being used. Consider consolidation options based on business needs and supporting marketing goals.
Complete a technology assessment and identify if these are a help, hindrance or have hidden opportunities that you currently aren’t taking advantage of.
Cleanse your data and tailor your database for the markets you’re targeting.
