5 Digital Marketing Strategies to Implement Today to Make Your Business Recession-Proof
The current economic climate is uncertain, In times of economic uncertainty, businesses often face the challenge of maintaining sales and profitability. Here are 5 cost-effective digital strategies to implement today to make your business flourish both during and after a recession.
1. Evaluate campaign ROI and shift your marketing budget accordingly
You should always be tracking the ROI, CPO, and CPL of your marketing campaigns, but during an economic downturn, this is one of the most crucial steps that need to be done at least on a monthly basis.
Calculating these basic metrics will help you better understand which platforms and which campaigns are among your top performers and which should be shifted or paused. One step that I see our clients take is changing the ratio of spend within social prospecting and retargeting campaigns.
While prospecting campaigns tend to be more expensive with a lower ROI, they can be crucial steps for driving new customers and new leads. During a recession, it is important to remember that gaining new customers is as essential as retaining returning ones. Our strategists help clients find the right budget balance specific to their needs.
Bonus Point: If paid media budgets need to be cut, our recommendation is to shift Pinterest and Tiktok's strategy towards a more organic approach. Not only is organic content “free” to post but also it has the tendency to be evergreen since both platforms act as a search engine.
2. Start working on SEO today
While SEO is not a quick fix, it is a very important part of any comprehensive marketing strategy. In a recession, when marketers are thinking about cutting down costs, the importance of having organic results on your side can not be emphasized enough. Following the top trends of SEO in 2023, audience-targeted content and quality is key.
Bonus Point: E-commerce companies should not sleep on Google shopping organic results. Google has opened its shopping search results to unpaid organic listings. For brands, this means that a broad new segment of Google search is available to grow organic sales. It also means understanding how Google Shopping works and how to include Google Shopping in your SEO efforts. Click here to learn how to activate your organic shopping listings today!
3. Get smarter about your sales and promotions
Understandably, Marketing teams might be tempted to run more saving events during a recession.
While customers do love a sale, having too many sale events and promotions can negatively impact product value and audience perception.
Create a seasonal sale calendar that caters to your specific business needs. Analyze your historical customer data to know how many touch points and which channels to activate during a promotion in order to maximize revenue and lower overhead costs.
4. Segment your email subscribers list
Not all email subscribers are equal. Your list is a gold mine of audience behavior data and can be mined to boost performance.
Start by segmenting your audience into active and inactive and lead them into customized funnels. Our data strategy team specializes in analyzing email and SMS lists based on, open rates, click and purchase patterns, and return cadence.
Bonus Point: Start re-sending your top-performing emails on a weekly and monthly basis: putting together new emails costs time and money, even with an in-house marketing and creative team. One of the best strategies that we have implemented with our customers this year was to re-use and re-send their top performers to a curated email segment, increasing the overall email ROI.
5. Optimize your SMS marketing strategy by establishing MMS vs SMS send cadence
What is SMS?
SMS stands for short message service. This type of text message doesn’t feature images, videos, or GIFs, and is limited to 160 characters.
What is MMS?
MMS stands for multimedia messaging service. As the name implies, this type of text message contains a form of media, whether that’s a static image, a GIF, or a video in MP4 format.
Since an MMS contains media, these types of messages are more expensive to send. MMS requires more effort from the creative and copy teams as well. However, our internal studies have shown that customers respond differently to SMS vs MMS. MMS typically tends to drive higher conversions and click-through rates compared to SMS.
That’s why most marketing strategies use a combination of SMS and MMS strategically to get the best results. Our team can help you put together a cost-effective texting, marketing strategy, driving down the overall spending while improving the ROI and revenue.
The bottom line is, don’t let fear hold you back and don’t stop marketing during a recession. Now it is the time to get creative with your strategy, optimize your budget and be smart about priorities, ensuring the success of your business.
Contact us to learn how our team can create a recesion-proof marketing strategy for you.
