How to market your way out of the coming COVID budget crunch

It turns out the forecast for business in 2021 is mixed, not the universal downturn that was predicted.

Encouraged by the vaccine, about a third of US companies are actually planning to increase investment in people and capabilities. For marketers at those companies, the path forward is clear: Make a case for investing in the brand, a bigger digital presence, and in the talent to make it happen.

For marketers at companies facing layoffs and budget cuts, it’s going to be a hard year, especially as they watch their better-funded counterparts take advantage of the COVID-driven migration to digital channels and ecommerce.

As a marketer, what can you do?

The short answer is to do what any beleaguered function does: Build influence without power, get things done without explicit permission (or enough money), and build consensus without anybody noticing.

The good news is that marketers are skilled at this. We do it with our customers in mind all the time. For marketers facing tough times in 2021, here’s how you can do it for the toughest customers of all, your internal stakeholders.

Turn numbers into narratives

We all know those statistics that have been repeated so often they become part of company lore.

It fired us up at Episerver when Forrester said we “provide customers a 299% return on investment over three years with a break-even point of less than 6 months.” It’s a solid stat, but the numbers also have a ring to them that helped us rally internally. It made the connection to our customers that much more tangible.

At your own company, find a data point that reminds people of the need to connect with customers. It might be a stat or even a single phrase from a testimonial. No matter how much or how little you’ve invested in getting data from your operations and sales, there’s always that one nugget to mine.

Find it, build a story around it, and spread the word informally. It might take a few tries before you find a stat that sticks, but it’s an effective way to get your people telling a story in which your customers are the main characters.

Fire up internal communications

There’s a good case to be made that this will help your company operate better remotely. As an international company, Episerver was investing in more screen time between colleagues before the pandemic. Since COVID hit, our leadership have put in even more screen time. It’s well worth the Zoom fatigue.

As a champion for marketing you no longer have the informal circulation of late night working sessions or chance meetings in the halls to build relationships and build your case. You might have video happy hours or birthdays, but those are rightly not for shop talk.

One way forward is to connect with your own people the way you want your company to connect with customers. There’s a good chance that your company has a neglected internal communications apparatus that could use some love. It could be an internal social network, a company-only hub, or a newsletter.

Adopt it, give it a makeover, and turn it into a case study for the possibilities of investing in a richer digital experience. Make internal communications the place to informally tell a story about your company’s growth. Even if marketing isn’t the star of the story, you’ll still be the ones who made sure it got told.

Use marketing to supercharge corporate social responsibility and other partnerships

2020 was a banner year for champions of stakeholder capitalism. And given the challenges the world is already facing just weeks into 2021, this year will be no different. Smart companies will recognize just how much their identities are shaped by the communities they operate in, both online and offline.

At Episerver, this is true for our global community of developers. Without the strong digital partnerships we have with them, we wouldn’t be who we are.

At your own company, look for a relationship that could benefit from a stronger digital connection. It could be an in-person community service program that’s on hold because of COVID, a fine arts organization that needs to find a new way to reach audiences, or a set of fans that need a new mechanism to connect with one another. The events of 2020 have made visible a host of organizations advancing social justice that could use help.

Whatever the cause your company invests in, give it the best thinking that a digital experience-forward approach can offer it.

In the world of the arts, (a community I know) we’ve seen a crowd-sourced TikTok musical, the transformation of performance space into public art, and the most traditional organizations make new use of digital investments.

While budgets may be limited for some marketers in 2021, the new digital tools available to the profession as a whole mean that making our case and rethinking what we do need be limited only by our imagination.

===

Kirsten Allegri Williams is Chief Marketing Officer of Episerver, the world’s leading customer-centric digital experience platform.