Digital Marketing During A Recession: Should You Do It?
With most of the world in lockdown, the economy has taken a massive downturn, with predictions in the news that the UK will go into the worst recession in 300 years it can be quite scary to think about spending more money on your business.
But the show must go on, so how do you adapt your digital marketing to work during a time where let’s face it, people won’t have much money to spend. In this article we’ll cover exactly what to do to make sure your business stays relevant during these challenging times. We’ve broken down our tips for digital marketing during a recession into the following chapters:
- Prioritise your profit
- Adapt to succeed
- Change your creative
- Check your competitors
- In the long run
Digital Marketing During A Recession
How can you prioritise your profit?
Every business has products or services that perform well, while also having products that don’t perform well, that’s normal, at the end of the day you still market both to maximise your potential to get profits, but in a recession that most likely will have to change, with money being tighter it’s worthwhile to look at what you offer and see what performs well and what doesn’t, then from there market the more popular service or product to make sure it stays popular, however if you notice that your less popular product is actually more relevant to the current times then it’s probably best to market that instead, now that may seem like conflicting information but it just depends on your situation what you do.
How can you adapt your digital marketing to succeed during a recession?
In a way this point is similar to our previous point, in fact very similar, but during a recession you need to take a look at how you’re getting paid traffic to your website and social media pages. Do you have an ad set that doesn’t perform well? Scrap it! Put the money you typically spend on that ad set into the better performing ads or just save it for the hard times, whatever you do just make sure you don’t keep put money into something that doesn’t perform, that isn’t typically an issue but when money is tight within business you need to cut costs where you can. Also take a look at your social media accounts and perhaps allocate some more time to the pages that are the most successful in terms of reach and engagement. We’re not recommending you to stop running all pages but just think about what performs well and what doesn’t.
Change your creative strategy
The landscape has changed massively in the past 3 months and so the tone of a current and relevant advertising campaign in todays world will be completely different to 3 months ago. There are also many market trends to be aware of. Social media usage is up 87% because of the lockdown measures, so people are consuming a lot more content, have you thought about the current creative campaign you are using? Have you asked yourself if it is suitable for the world that we ar currently living in? Stats have shown that posts with photos or graphics on twitter and Facebook perform a lot better than posts with just text, get around 200% more engagement in fact, so why not start putting together some photos and infographics to share on your pages, perhaps make an infographic that goes through some of the changes you’ve had to make because of coronavirus and the restrictions and how that will benefit your customers/clients, but make sure the content you do post provides some form of value to prospective consumers as that is the best way to turn organic traffic into paying customers.
Competitors
Pretty much all businesses look at what their competitors do, in most cases it’s to take a peek at their marketing strategies and what they promote. But in a recession you need to watch what your competitors so closely as one right move from them and one wrong move from you can lead to an increase in business for them and a decrease for you. Make sure you don’t copy what your competitors do, but if you notice they make a move that works for them, why not do something similar and see if it has the same effect on you. An example of this would be how some business began offering discounts to health service workers as a thank you for their work during the coronavirus crisis, this lead to great publicity for those companies, so their competitors began to offer a similar discount to get there selves some publicity. Which you guessed it, lead to them getting some good publicity as well.
In the long run
You should always be in it for the long run with marketing, as you want to find the right, most profitable client or customers that comes back for more time and time again. Coming into a recession these clients will be key to keeping you afloat as they’re loyal to your brand, so don’t alienate them while changing your marketing, make sure you keep these customers in mind while also finding ways to find your next profitable client. Using our tips will definitely set you on a good start, but really depending on your business you may need to tweak a little bit. One short final tip would be to just hold out, in a recession most businesses will struggle but times will always get better, it’s about holding out and not shutting down, this will help you prepare for when things go back to normal.
So let’s answer the question. Should you be increasing your marketing during a recession? Absolutely, as this article mentions you’ll need to make some changes to your strategy, but if you were to stop marketing then your business would struggle and be left behind when the economy goes back to normal. So if you’re running a business, don’t stop your marketing, keep pushing your business out to potential consumers and you’ll thrive.
Cost Savings
One great cost saving option could be to engage with a creative video agency. This way you can definitely achieve considerable cost savings by having your creative agency and production company under one roof. Since the dawn of online digital content and marketing there are now plenty of really good creative video agencies to choose from.
Is there anything you think you would do differently? Let us know, we would love to hear what you think! And from everyone at Beast we hope you stay safe and well.
