RESILIENT COMPANIES PERFORM BETTER LONG TERM AND LEARN TO PIVOT MARKETING PROGRAMS
No doubt manufacturers have a lot to balance lately—supply chain volatility, employment challenges and tightening profit margins. Added to these obstacles are rapidly changing operational demands, technological advancements and escalating costs, which have put a pinch on manufacturing businesses like never before. These factors are pushing businesses to eliminate inefficient spending and focus their efforts to areas that deliver immediate value. Marketing in uncertain times is usually first on the chopping block. But is that the best decision?
This isn’t a new scenario. When times are tough, manufacturers adjust marketing programs to bare minimums without thinking of the long-term impact. There is a fine line between reacting to immediate, external forces and demonstrating a prowess when it comes to marketing in times of uncertainty. What can seem like wise choices for the balance sheet and short-term goals is not always best for your customer, sales pipeline or the resiliency of your business.
So, when faced with challenging times, as a manufacturer, how can you pivot your marketing program to withstand immediate obstacles? You’re in luck – we are sharing the reasons why you should maintain certain marketing efforts, while adjusting others to meet industry and market pressures.
REASONS TO MARKET YOUR #MANUFACTURING BUSINESS DURING UNCERTAIN TIMES.
When uncertainties are on the horizon, it’s easy to back away from marketing programs to protect budgets. But that’s the wrong road to take. These moments call for strategic, creative and cost-effective marketing activities. Yes, at some point you may need to prioritize budgetary spend on other things, but before you make cuts to your marketing program, take these facts into consideration:
- Deep and immediate cuts can cause irreversible damage. We saw this happen to countless companies during the pandemic, recession and supply chain shortages. Manufacturers quickly halted marketing programs instead of taking a moment to assess what will deliver value and make their brand resilient during the challenge. Instead of innovating and pivoting their marketing, they overreacted and lost sales and market share.
- Challenging times offer the best opportunity to gain market share. When a tough time hits, it impacts everyone. Your competition thins, and as a result, customers are in need of partners that will stand the test of time to support their operations. If you halt your marketing programs, you lose the opportunity to take market share from competitors that pull back or end their activities.
- Communication with your audience is always critical, but even more so when times get tough. While reigning in expenses is important, internal and external communication is critical, especially when things are changing. Communication is akin to breathing air. It’s the lifeblood of a strong and resilient company. A company that can’t or doesn’t communicate during difficult times risks permanently harming themselves.
- Cost-effective marketing does exist. When budgets are tight, there are inexpensive marketing activities that still deliver value. Earned media, social media and basic search engine optimization (SEO) tactics are the activities we recommend focusing on when resources are limited. Earned media, a common public relations activity, builds brand credibility through coverage by a third party (i.e., publication). Social media helps build awareness and engagement with broad audiences and is a way to repurpose existing content. And, basic SEO practices lay a foundation for your website to be found in search results and build your ranking among competitors.
- When times get tough, focus on building trust not growing revenue. The key to resiliency during uncertain times is consistent communication paired with #strategicmarketing. This combination allows you to generate demand for your products/services. Pivoting your marketing to activities that deliver long-term value will help keep your head above water during the challenge, while outgrowing and outexecuting your competitors. Create a new marketing plan that includes thought leadership articles, how-to guides and content that addresses typical customer questions.
- Customer retention is the key to surviving the trials. When times get tough, loyal customers are what sustain your business. It’s imperative to remember that loyal customers are the primary and reliable source of every business’ revenue. And they support your organic growth. Marketing to your customers, addressing their concerns and continuing to build trust through a retention program is essential.
- Sales teams need support from the marketing department. Marketing plays a critical role in helping to funnel leads to your sales team, both now and down the road. When marketing campaigns continually bring in high-quality leads through strategic demand-generating activities, the sales team can focus on converting those into sales, rather than splitting efforts on finding new leads and driving sales conversions. The sales process is often long for B2B businesses. It could take months, or years, to close a sale generated from a marketing campaign. Slowing marketing now will only impede future sales.
CONSIDER AN INVESTOR APPROACH TO MARKETING
When marketing leaders are asked to cut spending during challenging times, they often cut across the board—wiping out entire programs without thinking through the risks. They feel that by spending less, they are delivering savings. This isn’t necessarily true.
The key to promoting a business during tough times is not to wipe out spending entirely, but focus on flexibility and pivoting marketing’s focus to areas that deliver the most value and provide opportunities for future growth.
Focusing on long-term growth from marketing activities can be thought of in a similar way to how investors think about portfolio performance and investments during recessions. During times of uncertainty, they take advantage of lower stock prices and pivot investments there. Investors look at the data. They look for patterns of performance and areas that are proven to rebound and sustain their overall portfolio.
You should do the same thing. Focus on the data. Discover what is performing well, filling your sales funnel with leads, supporting your sales team’s processes and delivering a quantifiable return. Adjust limited marketing budgets and invest what you can.
TIPS ON HOW TO FUEL BOTTOM LINE GROWTH AND PIVOT YOUR MARKETING PROGRAMS
- List everything you spend time on. Consider using a spreadsheet to list every marketing activity you spend money on. Rather than using “print advertising” as a line item, identify specific publications and ad sizes. List specific social media platforms, digital ad outlets, website, communication tools and such. Follow that column with details about the types of media, targeted market segment, benchmark goals, your average results and average spend. This helps you take a step back and get a broad view of everything within your marketing strategy. It's important to also note what activities are capturing leads and what is either building brand awareness or thought leadership. Then, flag what is under performing and what is not hitting your ideal target audience.
- Embrace a full-funnel marketing strategy. Once you have a list of all your marketing activities, look at where each line item is supporting your sales and marketing funnel. Are marketing activities top heavy? Focused on brand awareness and demand generation? Impacting the bottom of the funnel more—customer loyalty and lead conversions? When you know what activities add value, find a way to balance them throughout each phase of the sales and marketing funnel. This implements what’s known as a full-funnel marketing strategy. It will generate demand, deploy value-driven activities to push the prospect into the sales process, capture engagement data and provide a higher return on sales conversions—all while keeping your marketing program within your now limited budget.
- Consult with your agency on low value-add activities. Your marketing agency should be a partner through any challenge and want to see you succeed. They also likely have a strong pulse on everything happening within your marketing program and should be able to provide some obvious recommendations to trim spending. For example, maybe they spend time editing images for your campaigns. This can be time intensive, and time is money. Additionally, image editing is likely not a value-add activity, so they might be able to cut this process from your monthly costs without making a big impact on program results.
- Consolidate external partners with internal resources. If your external agency is completing convenient activities, it might make sense to pull some in-house, assuming your team has the skills and capacity. For example, some agencies strategize, craft inspirational creative concepts and implement projects. Your internal team might have the skills to implement the projects with a little training. This scales your agency back to only handling the big picture tasks and helps trim that expense.
- Consider investing in technology. Yes, we get it – you are trying to cut expenses. But investing in technology and new marketing tools might help save costs and time elsewhere. Technology has the capability to automate processes, engage leads, process data and track activities.
In Conclusion
Keep in mind that your business processes may never go back to the way they were before. But building in flexibility and resiliency into your business now will help prevent your teams from facing the strain in the future. ?They will be agile and experienced in implementing these tips to make the most of limited marketing budgets.
Even though it’s tempting to drastically cut budgets and pull back on marketing, we believe it’s important to continue investing in it—even if that means limiting your focus to those that deliver a lot of value. These challenging times can define your business as resilient, trusting and capable of forging ahead when competition can’t. Or your business can be defined as one that recedes from all activities and protects budgets in hopes of catching up after the turbulence ends. Regardless of the path you take, invest with strategic and data-driven choices, keeping in mind the long-term impact. And when in doubt, find a trusting agency partner to come alongside and navigate you through rough waters to calm horizons.
