How to Adjust Your Marketing For A Recession

If you’re like literally anyone else, you’re starting to feel the pressure of all the recession talk. Heading into a recession can be extremely nerve-racking for a small business or start-up. As a result, business owners often prepare to make cuts and decide what’s up first on the chopping block.

It’s common for advertising and marketing to be one of the first things to get the ax. However, this might be one of the worst things to remove (and I’m not just saying that because I’m in marketing!). This is a prime time to build your foundation, gain trust, and provide value – think big picture! It’s likely your target audience is also feeling the burn, feeling stressed, and looking for free education and entertainment. That’s where you come in…

Harvard Business finds that businesses who indiscriminately cut costs, especially for marketing, put themselves at a disadvantage; “Marketing expenditures in areas from communications to research are often slashed across the board—but such indiscriminate cost cutting is a mistake.” They note that businesses that focus on honing their marketing strategy, rather than taking “an ax” to their marketing, tend to fare the best. 

With all that said, there should be changes, not cuts. From maintaining brand awareness to targeting repeat customers with value-based advertising, marketing your business is more important than ever during a recession. Let’s explore the critical marketing factors to keep your brand relevant and your customer engaged during a recession. 

Focus on Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is how familiar your brand is to customers, both in and outside your target niche. Building brand awareness during a recession can be a boon to your business. By instilling trust in your audience, you build your potential customer base. Building brand recognition comes down to solving a need. Once you identify what needs your product solves, marketing it to a price-conscious audience becomes that much easier. 

While spending may be minimal during a recession, customers are more likely to return to brands they recognize and trust. Plus, businesses that maintain high brand awareness during a downturn may see an increase in customers once the economy is on an upswing. Although your customer base may be more intrigued by lower-priced competition during a recession, increased brand awareness and deal-conscious marketing may help stabilize your business. 

TL;DR – Ensure you’re the first brand your customer thinks of when they’re ready to purchase.

Target “Pain Points” over “Salesy Content”

As Harvard Business notes, “[B]ecause most consumers become more price sensitive and less brand loyal during recessions, they can be expected to seek out favorite products and brands at reduced prices or settle for less-preferred alternatives.” This is one of the key reasons to avoid “in your face” advertisements during a recession. Instead, target the need your product solves and try to avoid sales pitches in general. 

Customers who feel a brand is overly pushy may be turned off from the product altogether, especially with a strained wallet. By focusing your marketing on identifying with your customer and seeking to offer a solution to their needs, you can avoid the knee-jerk reaction garnered by aggressive advertisement. 

TL;DR – Don’t sell your product, sell the solution to a problem.

Provide Value in Your Niche

In the same vein as the above section, proving your product offers value in your niche can go a long way to promoting your business. Similarly, ensuring your company is seen as an information leader in your niche can increase trust and customer base. 

Creating blogs, guest blogs, and videos and offering free downloads can solidify your company as the end-all-be-all resource for your specific audience. Not only will this help make your brand a household name, but it will also help keep your company in your customer’s minds when they have disposable income. 

Grow Your Email List

Providing information and growing your newsletter go together. During a recession, avoid overly sales-based newsletters. Instead of framing your communications as a sales pitch, offer informational brochures, free downloadable content, or business updates. Likewise, growing your email list is essential during a recession, as an email list is a list of potential customers. While a recession may not be the best time to capitalize on your newsletter list, it is a great time to build brand identity and recognition in your niche. When the time is right, you’ll have a whole customer base ready to go.

Work on SEO

Thankfully, almost everything in this article helps contribute to your overall SEO score. By posting optimized content, updating your website, and maintaining your search rank, you put yourself in a prime position for sales once the market climbs. Keep in mind that most people don’t search past the first page of Google. An astounding 75% of searchers stop at the first page. Therefore, SEO optimization is crucial to driving traffic to your site with minimal cash investment and maximal output. 

Evaluate Your Return on Investment for Marketing

If you’ve worked with any freelancer or agency, you’re probably very familiar with the ‘testing periods’. These are crucial and provide tons of data for future marketing efforts, however, testing comes with a cost. And we get it – now is not the time for all the testing.

During a recession, you should assess each marketing strategy’s return on investment (ROI). Evaluate your marketing plan with a scalpel and cut away anything that isn’t performing. Of course, performance does not necessarily mean sales; focus on trimming your marketing according to brand awareness and overall value. 

Most marketing strategies are still essential in a recession; they need retailoring. This is where keeping track of past marketing campaigns comes in handy. By monitoring past results, you can decide where to trim your spending. In most cases, being diligent with ad spending, influencer posts, and more can reduce your marketing budget without harming your business. 

Focus on Value-Based Advertising 

Should you cut advertising? No! If you can afford it, don’t ever stop the ads. But like everything else, it’s time for a new approach.

I think you get the idea by now – focus on providing value over making sales pitches. A perfect example of value-based advertising is from Microsoft. Microsoft has a branch of advertising aimed at past clients that offer free informational products for things like Word and Excel. By providing free information, Microsoft builds an admiring customer base that is more likely to purchase its products in the future. 

Tailoring your ads to past customers by adding value to their current purchases is an incredible way to ‘wow’ people and ensure your customers feel valued.

Ready to reevaluate your marketing strategy? Send me a message!

Here at Planted Marketing, we focus on organic content marketing. Not only does organic content marketing help build brand awareness, but it is also crucial to gain trust with your audience through knowledge sharing and building niche authority.

An excellent example of our past work is with Best Coast Tours, a Southern California Tour Guide. Thanks to a mixture of content marketing and Google advertising, BCT not only survived two years of closures and complications through the COVID-19 pandemic but has continued to grow as a business thanks to staying on the first page of Google. We love all small businesses and are dedicated to doing what it takes to make sure they survive all the curve balls that get thrown our way!

Talk to you soon! – Berlyn

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Planted Marketing is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing and organic solutions for woman-owned brands. Our wide variety of services allows for customized plans that work best for your brand and each stage of growth. Want to learn more? Send us a message at info@planedmarketing.com.