An Open Letter: Recession-proof your marketing ASAP

Dear Visionary,

Did you know the fundamental formula for “growth” has changed almost overnight for top VCs and CEO with recessionary pressures in 2022? There has been a seismic shift in investor sentiment that's requiring leadership at tech companies to cut back on spending in favor of free cash flow. The path to success is no longer about growth, growth, growth at any cost, which defined sentiment during a historic bull market. Margin, revenue and max profitability are now a top priority for c-suite. Industry-leading and well-funded companies like Uber, Peloton, and Instacart are being impacted in a big way, and I expect more will follow in their footsteps. Costs are being cut, budgets are shrinking, and every activity that does not produce attributable ROI is on the chopping block. The least efficient marketing and incentive spend WILL be pulled back. Creative or campaigns that require a big capital investment will be slowed. The typical way to produce creative is expensive, slow and not grounded in performance KPIs. Marketing efforts that don't translate directly to profits are now irrelevant.

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The good news is that there are new frameworks like “top down creative,” “IGC,” and “modular production” that smart marketers are using to scale both organic and paid social massively (hint: it doesn’t require a huge budget or a bigger team).?We're calling it "growth marketing 2.0," and it will help reduce your headcount, produce free cashflow to responsibly invest your marketing dollars to INCREASE growth and profitability at the same time with performance-focused creative and creator generated content.

Source: CNBC

The SINGLE biggest adjustment you can make to scale your growth in 2022 is to establish a dedicated “performance creative pod” to build a tailored growth playbook over the next 30 days so you can discover your brands unique growth loops, and then rapidly test leading creative strategies to identify winning experiments that scale.? Then leverage important (but uncommon) metrics together, like Thumb Stop Ratio and Click To Purchase Ratio, to get actionable creative insights and gain an advantage over your competition. Cut losing experiments quickly. Iterate on winners. Reallocate that budget to maximize ROI. Develop new creative concepts from the data. Rinse and repeat. No fluff. No BS. Every dollar spent informs the next. You CAN scale your growth THIS QUARTER, even with a tight marketing budget. It’s NOT possible if you are still developing creative the old way, butting for internal resources with a busy internal creative team.?

Source: CNBC

BUT the good news is that there is a simple process tweak you can make right now to get top performing creative within the 60-90 days and look like a hero to an executive team that has previously said things like…

• “We need to cut costs”
• “What is our ROI on this?”
• “How is this tracking with our larger goals?”
• "Video is too expensive"
• “Organic social isn’t driving results”“Influencer doesn’t work”?
• “Our creative team is slammed.”
• “We need to re-allocate budgets.”

…and you’ll finally be able to focus on the broader strategy and deliver some big wins for your department because you have a dedicated performance creative SWAT team, good data, and a creative strategy to outperform your target KPIs and your competition.

Source CNBC

I have never been more confident in our approach at ZeroTo1, and I'm so excited to grow with our partners during this season while others are pulling back. We're going to respond together by doing more with less, and exiting the typical value-cost tradeoff by doing things DIFFERENTLY. We're going to leverage our track-record of growing high-impact brands and our startup DNA of hustle, grit and innovation for our partners and grow together in this season.

Let's take it to the next level.

- Micah Whitehead, Co-founder and Managing Director @ ZeroTo1