If you were to guess, how many recessions would you say that people in the Western hemisphere have seen in the last century? Mexico has officially only suffered through four, and Canada has gone through twelve, but the United States has toughed out fourteen significant economic slowdowns. If your business will likely face an absence of consumer confidence and a choke on spending more than once every decade, shouldn’t you have a plan for keeping your business visible and viable during those times?
Regardless of how you answered that last question, keep this point in mind: a smart plan for marketing in a recession is also a smart plan for marketing in any other economic climate. The big difference is that the margins are thinner and the stakes are higher when people tighten down their spending. So these tips will help your enterprise survive the lean times, but they will supercharge your results when cash starts flowing more freely again.
1. Don't stop.
People are drowning in content every minute of the day. You must be memorable to be visible, but if you aren't putting any message out there you might as well not exist. Stopping your advertising may seem a better option than carving pieces out of your production– because how can you stay in business if you can't produce your product?
But in competitive markets, cutting advertising is like chopping one leg off of a distance runner: forward progress can still be made, but not victory! Your competitors may take that opportunity to crowd you out. They may be asking “How much can we scale back on marketing and still maintain our position in the market?” Your disappearance will make their job easier. Halting your advertising could mean that when customers are ready to buy and start looking for a solution, they can’t find you.
Kellogg’s gives us a great example of making smart moves to navigate a poor economy (the Great Depression, no less) and actually gaining ground in their race. When stock markets crashed in 1929, Kellogg did not stop their advertising, or even cut it– they doubled their ad budget. They capitalized on the latest technology, radio advertising, to launch their “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” slogan in 1932. That messaging has really gone the distance!
Instead of removing an entire process (like marketing) from their business model, Kellogg’s found ways to maximize efficiency in several processes, leading them to greater profitability overall. They downsized their work day to six hours, which effectively raised their employees’ hourly wage by 12.5% while cutting work hours by 25%. Most of the workers liked this schedule better, and after two years their productivity equaled the 40-hour workweek levels. In 1933, when other food manufacturers were closing their doors, Kellogg’s had raised profits by 30%.
2. Be genuine when addressing consumer concerns.
Feeling worried about the unanswered questions of a volatile economy is natural; It’s the qualities your business projects from those feelings that will determine how well you weather the coming changes.
Appearing desperate– assuming a “wait and see” posture, delaying essential hires, slashing prices in a panic, etc.– will guarantee your company becomes a closed chapter in history. People are naturally repelled by that energy. And pretending there’s nothing wrong and carrying on with business as usual looks delusional– it’s an equally big mistake.
But there’s no need to build your “economic crisis” messaging campaign from scratch. The core values that make your business tick haven’t changed. The most authentic way you can address the new and temporary “normal” of an economic downturn is with the voice you have always used to instill trust and cultivate connection with your current customers.
Organic (not paid) social media channels are prime spaces where you can dialog with your audiences, and express the genuineness and optimism that will reassure them. Know which platforms your customers are frequenting and focus your efforts there.
What to say? Consumers across several generations have taken an increased interest in not just “what” a business is selling, but also “why” the business as a whole cares. And this interest is renewed when the economy shows signs of instability. Genuine philanthropy and a responsiveness to financial pressures are applauded by the public. Even people who would never be your customers can tip their hat to your way of handling a crisis, and prompt others who are in your target audience to give you a look.
100 years ago, Kellogg’s created jobs for workers that went beyond the making of cereal. Some of their new workers built a large, ten-acre park on the grounds of Kellogg’s manufacturing facility in Battle Creek, Michigan. This demonstrated an investment in people’s lives and an enrichment of the larger community.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation began its history building schools and outdoor recreational facilities throughout the state, and the country took notice. Even President Hoover met with W.K. Kellogg to discuss the structure and culture in his business that had cultivated such loyalty and hope.
3. Take good care of the customers you already have.
Your business isn't the only one feeling the pinch– the people doing business with you are also struggling with rising costs. Marketing is not just for attracting new faces; maintaining good relationships with the customers you're currently relying on will carry you through economic turmoil. Whether acquiring new customers costs 5 or 25 times the cost of retaining existing customers in your industry, it’s a cost you’ve already paid in their cases. Now enjoy the higher ROI of keeping them satisfied!
Do not take your current customers or accounts for granted. Remind them of your value, and add value when you can, because they're looking to minimize costs just like you are, and you cannot afford to be an expense they choose to cut. So they must see your service as an investment, and feel that they're getting their money's worth.
4. Turn a “pull-back” into an opportunity.
Is everyone in your industry putting their megaphone down because of costs? Is your dominant competitor backing off and trying to coast on their reputation?
Guess what: now may be the best chance you ever have of catching up to them. At the least, there's some market share out there that is now up for grabs, for the one player in your market that is willing to stand out while everyone else is sitting (or lying) down.
Good businesses become dominant businesses by playing the long game and making opportunities while their competitors are unable to match their effort, timing, or reach. And when activity in a market dies down, you don't have to make a big splash to have a big impact. In short, the cost of commanding attention in your market goes down when your competition clams up.
Kellogg’s big splash in advertising coincided with their competitors greatly reducing their voice in public. The result? Kellogg’s cereal brands became the go-to product for consumers, because they’d actually heard of them. Kellogg’s market share exploded, to make them the top cereal brand in America– a position they hold to this day.
5. Focus on Efficiency
If you’re itching to pull more money back into your budget by cutting expenses, our advice to you can be summed up this way: Cut only what isn’t working, and optimize what is. Be honest with yourself– do you need to pay for every pair of eyeballs that goes past your billboard, or was that just a vanity buy? Review the performance of every marketing tactic you’re employing before you take the axe to the spending, but the test for effectiveness is very simple: whatever tactic is costing more money than it brings in needs to go.
Compare the actual performance of each individual marketing tactic– direct mail, radio ads, OTT, etc.– to the goals you set in your marketing plan. This will be easier with newer, digital platforms that provide analytics data for you to review, but ideally you should also have some customer feedback regarding which types of your advertising they remember seeing, and what really “reeled them in”.
Is your net spread too wide? Are you paying to get the attention of people that are not likely to buy? Narrow your focus based on interests, demographics, or even location. Google Ads and certain geofenced ad platforms can target your message down to collections of ZIP codes, so that you’re not advertising to people who have options closer to home. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the specificity and efficiency that many digital advertising platforms deliver when used to their fullest potential.
6. Plug the Leaks
Are potential customers showing interest when they begin their search for your product, then going dark or ruling you out when it comes time to close the deal? Could this be happening without your knowledge? There is no time like the present to audit your conversion funnels for weak points and missed opportunities, and make sure there are no detours keeping people from completing their journey from a prospect to a customer.
The following core questions should be reviewed first. And answers that were true before may need to be revised:
- Are you talking to the right audience(s)?
- Are you meeting them wherever they are– the media types they use?
- Are you speaking their language and really capturing their attention?
- Are you answering their questions and concerns– are you saying what they need to hear?
- Are you slowly establishing trust and credibility while not asking your audience to risk their money (or time) too soon?
- Are you anticipating and disarming their objections?
- Are you asking for the sale?
If there’s a problem with the fundamentals above, a six-figure website build and a fancy tech stack are not going to save you. That said, there are powerful tools available to you to help answer some of the questions in the middle of this list:
Google Analytics and Google Search Console can give you insight into how prospects find your site via search, which content on your site attracts the most engagement, and which traffic sources offer the highest concentration of leads. With this data you can build or fill in the gaps of the content that supports your sales.
Pretend you're a person who knows nothing about your service– focus hard past all of your knowledge and experience!– and begin asking and answering the questions that a newcomer would wonder about. Tailor content as responses to these questions, and search engines will connect prospects to your site as an authoritative resource. To consumers, a credible source of information is a more likely source for a good product.
Check conversion tracking. Google Analytics can also help you determine which channels and campaigns are actually resulting in sales. Why spend money on channels that just bring in lookers? Well, more questions can and should be asked, like is the campaign making a compelling offer, or are more time and impressions needed for the conversions to happen. But it is possible that the channels that perform well with a decent campaign will give you stellar results once you’ve optimized your campaign.
Review the performance of paid ads, whether on search, social platforms, or elsewhere, and double down on the high performers. Some ad services will automatically test all of your ads against each other and primarily serve the ads that prospects engage with most. But in all cases you should have a firm intent to your campaigns, measurable goals you want to attempt, and a list of indicators that will signal success or the need for further re-evaluation.
7. Find an expert, then trust them.
In lean times when efficiency means the life or death of your business, a cheap or free tool may be enticing. But be honest with yourself about the real cost of “wearing too many hats”– dividing your brainpower between managing your business and learning new systems that change quickly and need consistent monitoring.
Even the miracle that is AI can cost you precious man hours if you don't know how to instruct it to give you good results. Some advertising agencies are encouraging their people to become “prompting experts”, making them the go-to guys for handling specific learning models.
Marketing professionals know the advertising tools better than you do, and they stay up to date on the ever-changing software updates and platform requirements. They are chameleons, trained to think like you and your customer and to build the relationship in between.
And a good ad agency will prioritize your net growth, using the tactics they know will minimize wasteful spending– which means hiring them should make you money, not cost you.
Bonus: Marketing Tactics for a Tough Economy
The tactics below have one thing in common: maximum impact for the least amount of expenditure. This list gives a brief overview, but we invite you to browse our blog for more in-depth insight into all of these solutions !
Optimize your Website
Have you considered that a higher cost of fuel (or less money to buy it) could lead to more traffic on your website? Your online presence has likely only increased in importance since the pandemic lockdown, and most consumers begin their customer journey by window-shopping on the internet out of sheer convenience.
At this point in time your website should be a welcoming destination where information flows freely and customers find what they want almost instantaneously– that has become their expectation. And recession or not, people are still using search to find the products they want and get their questions answered, so optimizing your site for search is not going out of style anytime soon.
Make it easy for:
- Search engines to understand the structure of your site so they can present the results that their users are looking for. The easiest way of accomplishing this is usually to hire an SEO professional.
- Shoppers to dive deeper on the services they’re curious about when they visit your site. Don’t bury the FAQ’s! Anticipate the journey you want your customers to take through your site, and make that path accessible and easy to find.
- Buyers to make that purchase once they’re ready to commit. It could be as simple as making your buttons brighter, or placing them more prominently or more frequently. Also revisit your upsell strategy, and consider whether some products are easier add-on purchases than others in a time when buyers feel less free to spend.
Remarketing
We can’t think of a time when this tactic is not a good idea. In brief, remarketing campaigns act as “reminders” for customers that have already interacted with your brand in some way– visited a website, clicked an ad, filled out a form, etc.– and for some reason they haven’t converted yet. Maybe they are still on the fence about buying at all, or they found you early in their search for vendors and they’re continuing to shop around. When additional impressions on a prospect are required to familiarize them with your brand and persuade them to buy, remarketing can be the persistent nudge that turns “later” into “yes.”
And when buying cycles lengthen– like when prospects take more time to put together the money for a purchase because they’re in a recession, right?– ensuring that those waiting customers do not forget about you becomes crucial. Remarketing is hands-down the cheapest way to do that. Some platforms (like Facebook) can look further back in time at user activity on their own platforms, and reach users that were active up to a year ago, if you set the right targeting parameters on your campaign.
Most digital ad platforms have remarketing functionality, and Facebook and Google are both solid options. Keep in mind you must first gather a minimum number of active users or site visitors to send remarketing ads to them, and this number varies depending on the platform and the type of campaign.
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the cheapest ways to get in front and stay in front of prospects and current customers. Yes, I know that your inbox is covered in spam just like mine! But even though bad content is everywhere, customers still respond to good content. Be respectful of your prospects’ time– deliver real value to their inbox in quick, digestible pieces, and you will build the impressions that lead to trust and conversions.
Revise messaging to respond to new consumer behavior
Before you take the “red marker” to your website or ad messaging, think about the types of spending behaviors you have encountered in your customer relationships. Also consider that economic stresses may push prospective customers into a different type of behavior than they practiced before.
Notice that we’re not talking about levels of affluence, but the values that prospects consider when deciding where their money should go, how much they’re going to let go, and why. These categories will help us to respond to each group’s buying psychology:
Bare-minimum Buyers
This group could include those who’ve been deeply impacted financially or not, but the key is that they respond to economic pessimism with big cuts– they downsize, they put off big expenditures, they substitute for cheaper brands or forgo the purchase altogether. An abrupt job loss or expensive illness can put people in this group who previously held different spending habits.
Careful Buyers
Focused primarily on maintaining their standard of living, careful buyers may begin to space out their indulgences and postpone major ticket item purchases. But their spending habits remain close to their non-recession consumption levels. For example they may keep buying their favorite brands they use daily, but reduce the frequency of eating a meal out. People in this group feel confident that with minor adjustments they can keep their head above water when expenses rise, and are optimistic about life returning to normal in the long term.
Calm Buyers
Some demographics do help define this group– it is hard, after all, to act like you have unlimited means if you actually don’t! Those who hold the top 5-10% of buying power land in this segment– anyone with enough stable income to ride out an economic crisis and not change their spending behavior much, if at all. These consumers are more careful about what they buy than what they spend, and prioritize long term value. They’re looking past a momentary dip in the economy and looking for the growth opportunities that come afterward.
Care-free Buyers
This group will maintain their spending as usual, and will let tomorrow worry about itself. The demographics of this group tend younger, and more urban, and they focus on experiences rather than physical products– the types of purchases that are time-sensitive. Major expenditures may be put off, and many in this group rent instead of own and give little thought to savings.
Most of these groups– the calm buyers being the possible exception– will shift their spending priorities, adjust timetables, and reassign value between goods once a recession exerts pressure on their wallets.
What used to be an essential purchase could become an occasional treat. And a treat could still be a consistent purchase as a way of keeping up morale in a difficult time, depending on the price and perceived value. You have a lot of moving pieces to consider, and several of them hinge on the nature of your product.
Take a magnifying glass to the implications of your messaging. Now that the attitudes of your target audiences have changed, You may need to realign your messaging to remain relevant, appealing, and in consideration when your customers are obliged to change the math of their spending habits.
“Guerilla” Video Content
The public has become used to seeing amateur video from a cellphone on every social channel you could name, so video content doesn’t have to cost a fortune to be effective. Impromptu videos showcase authenticity and sincerity, highly valued qualities when people are anxious about the economy. Instead of shying away from their concerns, addressing them and encouraging your viewers can make your brand feel like a breath of fresh air.
Any good marketer would tell you to focus on the needs, hopes, and in this case fears of your customers, and present your brand as the solution to those needs, the key to reaching that better future they are anticipating. How polished your video looks is a secondary consideration– within reason– if the intent and tone of your message makes the right impact on the heart and mind of your audience.
But taking a little time in pre-production can make a huge impact on the final product. Preliminary scripting, a rehearsal or two, and making a short list of the shots you want to include can add huge production value and coherence to your content, and adds a variety of looks and messages that will extend the half-life of your campaign by preventing staleness.
Take a tip from how Hollywood used to make films: a little preparation up front saves money and aggravation later, and results in a coherent message that carries through multiple touch points (videos). And for just the cost of paying a video editor to cut your footage into bite-size pieces, you can turn one day of shooting into an entire multi-segment campaign.
Parting Thoughts
We are betting that your hope is the same as ours, and always has been: You can make lives better in your own unique way, and you know people will still need what you have to offer even when the economic future looks gloomy.
So while the struggle for consumer attention only gets more chaotic, we remind you that some things never change. Maintaining your presence in public– stating your brand promises and staying true to them, offering exceptional service, and showing understanding for the pressures our neighbors face (which is simply treating people like people)– can cut through the noise and the doubt of an uncertain economy and win you lasting relationships with loyal customers.
