Recession Marketing Strategies: Here’s What I’m Doing

What impact did COVID-19 have on marketing budgets? And what is YOUR game plan to move things forward, and get a jump on your competition?

Now more than ever is the time to share the learning and marketing plan that will help you soar when the economic wind starts blowing.

Recent data from Advertiser Perceptions shows that 64% of U.S. marketers surveyed are holding back from launching new campaigns, while 50% are pulling entire campaigns mid-launch.

But before you turn on or off the marketing promotions, you may want to have a listen to a webinar I hosted with Victoria Albert from Infuse Media called Recession-Proof Your Marketing Priorities, offering some great marketing insights from historic recessions. 

After the webinar, I gathered with the team to put together an action plan for our own marketing plan V 2.0, surfacing some of the tips and advice that sparked new ideas and strategic direction to flush out in the next few weeks.

Turns out, there’s a pretty good case for putting the gas on with your market efforts now and throughout the recession, in creative ways. The question is, what, when, where… and how should you be communicating to your audience, customers, and fans. And what can you do to prepare for an economy uplift which I personally feel will be just ahead in our marketing industry - like in a month, maybe two.

Here’s my list of things that I’m working on now, to keep the business rolling and growing (we grew 15% the first quarter, and remained flat in April 2020 vs April 2019):

Improve Marketing Processes. Our marketing team members put together a pretty solid list of inefficiencies and snags that slow down our momentum. We’re transforming that list into quarterly goals following the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) for the next quarter. Goal: Save time and re-prioritize everything.

Deploy Data Science. We’re allocating the time and expense to dig into our marketing data way beyond the typical conversion rates, user acquisition cost, and marketing channel analysis. The new drivers that will tell our story will be lifetime value of customers, attribution to particular content assets and channels, and churn analysis to help surface “stories” that can pinpoint opportunities to impact and grow the business. Goal: Better spend time and money with insights from data.

Revamp Content Strategy. We’re tearing down our former content strategy and developing a new plan to better compete and win with organic marketing and mind share. New content silos, keywords, and topics have been mapped out in the last few months, and we’re shifting from short-form to long-form content across the board. All our content will continue to be “powered by” the writers at WriterAccess, and strategists too. But they’ll now be led by content strategists that have a purpose, mission, and budget to deliver on goals. Goal: Execute the strategy, and gauge the success quarterly with attribution to content assets rolled out with the strategy.

Improve Content Style. In our webinar, Victoria points out that it’s time to change our tone and style with marketing campaigns at this time, but that doesn’t mean “freezing up” with communication. For example, our banners feature inspirational quotes that are enlightening readers, offering value and insights without any sales pitch. All our content will have what we call “Snap, Crackle, and Pop” moving forward. Content snaps when a headline catches your attention. Content pops when it touches your heart or makes you smile. And content pops when it inspires you to take action or make a purchase. Goal: Pinpoint the style we get excited to emulate, and our writers too, and make sure we stay on course with every asset we create.

Expand ConTech Stack. We reviewed more than 200 tools for the Content Marketing Tool Talks this year that are now displayed on the CMC Tool Talks page. The exhaustive exercise led us to make our own picks of the top 20 tools that we will be using moving forward in the next year. If you want the list, send me a comment and I’ll post the list for everyone on our secret tools we’ve selected for content marketing. Goal: Ask more marketing professionals (like you right now): What’s in your marketing stack that you can’t live without?

Publish Meaningful Content. Now more than ever, it’s time to amplify the amount of meaningful, helpful, informative content, and to publish a steady stream of quality content that keeps readers coming back for more. And we need to develop a genuine tone and voice for the content we publish and promote. It’s also time to officially stop “selling” with our marketing efforts. Offering meaningful content is the right way to engage, connect, and grow business organically—more on that later. Goal: All content we publish must be a few of the following: meaningful, helpful, information, value driven, worth reading, and/or not boring.

Customer Success Fusion. Choosing to launch our new platform during the pandemic proved to be a big-time learning experience. Turns out that tech rollouts are super complicated, especially complete re-writes of the code base and new database. Testing is the key, and re-testing. We failed to exhaust that effort, but our CS Team saved us with a life jacket, helping to surface the bugs quickly, and support customers and talent along the way. Everyone in our company piled in the front seat to ride shotgun, and we learned a ton along Launch Way. Goal: Speak to customers more. And speak to CS that speaks to customers about their thoughts on what we’re doing and how we can do it better.

These are just a few of the changes we’re making for our game plan to keep our growth going. The key is to keep listening, learning, and sharing ideas.