7 Marketing Moves to Make in a Downturn

Picture this: your marketing is firing on all cylinders. You’re testing, you’re growing. You made the case for more budget and got it (go you!). 🚀 🚀 But then - record scratch -  the economy looks shaky and suddenly you’re in cost-cutting mode.

Now you’re faced with some tough decisions. What marketing strategies can you use in a downturn to keep growing?

Good news: uncertainty doesn’t mean your marketing needs to stop.

Personally, I love the challenge of a downturn.

Maybe it’s because I started my career during the Great Recession, right before the bottom dropped out of the market. Or maybe because I've seen so many "new normals" and "unprecedented times" since. Or maybe I'm just competitive.

Whatever the reason, I find the creativity and strategic savvy required to get through a downturn and come out ahead to be so energizing.

But I also know that uncertainty can be paralyzing, and a lot of marketers are facing uncertainty right now.

For when that stuck feeling hits, I’ve outlined seven crucial marketing moves that can help you not only weather the storm, but also position your brand for growth when the economy rebounds. By proactively embracing change and optimizing your marketing approach, you can emerge stronger and more resilient in the face of smaller marketing budgets and economic downturns.

1. Assess and Reassess Your Marketing Strategy

Your marketing strategy is your game plan for finding, reaching and engaging audiences that matter to your business, based on what you know about them and the value your products or services can offer. The best marketing strategies are dynamic and open to evolving as new information and data becomes available. When you’re facing uncertainty, it’s even more important to treat your marketing strategy as a starting point that’s based on what you knew at the time. 

You know meaningfully more than you did before? It’s time to reassess. 

One way to evaluate your strategy is to write down a list of assumptions, questions and missing data that you had when you initially set it. Revisit the list and take note of where you have more information now or where the business and economic context have shifted, and see if it changes your approach.

You’ll want to reassess your marketing strategy quarterly. This gives your previous strategic decisions time to play out. Strategy pivots should be thoughtful responses not knee-jerk reactions. Overhauling your strategy too often is as much of a mistake as setting it and then never changing it again. 

2. Invest in Understanding Your Consumers

If you have a marketing strategy, you already have a core understanding of your target audience. The problem is your consumer insights and personas were likely constructed in a better economy. You have to anticipate that consumer behaviors – spending, saving, etc. – will change in a downturn. You may not have the clearest view of your consumers’ psychographics, meaning their attitudes, values, beliefs and goals that inform their behaviors. Not to mention that humans are “predictably irrational,” as behavioral economist Dan Ariely has written, and it’s helpful to know what form that irrationality takes in your target.

Investing in understanding your consumers at both macro and micro levels will enable you to make better marketing decisions. This can look like:

• Government economic and consumer data (e.g., Federal Reserve, Bureau of Labor Statistics, etc.)

• Proprietary consumer data (e.g., Net Promoter Scores, spending, etc.)

• Pulse surveys

• Custom consumer research

Ultimately, you want some process and mechanism by which you and your team are getting a regular cadence of new insights. The cadence that makes sense will depend on the degree of uncertainty you’re facing and how rapidly the context and thus, consumer behavior, is changing. 

For example, during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, uncertainty was extremely high, the situation was changing daily and consumer behavior was highly unpredictable and changeable. I was leading the Covid-19 crisis response content marketing strategy at a large consumer financial institution, and we set up daily and weekly consumer insights gathering from a diverse set of sources. That gave us a higher degree of certainty that our strategy was relevant and responsive when the consumer need for information and resources was highest. Over time, as the context stabilized and we better understood consumer behavior, we moved to weekly and monthly insights.

3. Update Your Creative Assets

Hand-in-hand with staying on top of changing consumer behavior, you should audit your marketing campaign creative to make sure it’s still relevant and appropriately sensitive to the current environment.

For instance, if you’re marketing a cashback credit card and you learn that your target audience has been disproportionately affected by layoffs so they’re only spending on essentials, you may want to update your visuals and copy to highlight the cashback benefit on everyday spending rather than on discretionary items like entertainment.

4. Maintain Your Marketing Channel Mix, Even if You Exit Specific Channels

When marketing budgets shrink, there’s often a rush to cut upper funnel, awareness-driving, less attributable channels and tactics. If you can’t tie it directly to a sale, it doesn’t matter, right?

Resist the urge.

I’m not saying to stay in under-performing channels. Or to spread your budget so thin you can’t be effective. I am saying that channels work together, not in silos.

If you understand your consumer’s journey to purchase your product or service, you know that their decision hinges on multiple touchpoints and channels. If you want to see your funnel collapse, cut the channels that enable your last click channel to close the sale.

Instead:

• Think critically about your channel dynamics – separately and together

• Make sure you know and measure the role of each channel

• Experiment with different placements and tactics within a channel that let you cover more of the consumer journey

• Get out of underperforming channels and tactics

• Keep the core set of channels that span the consumer journey and work well together

5. 80/20 Your Marketing Budget to Allow for Innovation

Innovation and testing can be one of the first things to go when you’re in a budget crunch. While it can seem like this makes sense short-term, it puts you in a tough spot all around. In the short-term, testing and optimization can help you get the most out of the investments you’re making. Longer-term, trying new marketing moves now is the way to find small, early wins that can be expanded and scaled when the economy improves and budgets come back. Ramping up marketing innovation from scratch is like trying to run a 100 meter sprint from a standing start with no warm-up: built for a stumble and pulled hamstring. Ouch.

So how do you keep testing, optimizing and innovating when budgets are tight? Follow an 80/20 approach.

• Allocate 80% of your budget to your “knowns” - these are the channels, tactics, etc. that you have high certainty will drive results. These are tried and tested.

• The remaining 20% of your budget goes to testing and innovation. These are grounded bets that you’re making - i.e., you have data/insights-driven reason(s) to believe they’ll perform, but they’re untested.

• When something in your 20% works, you roll it into your 80%, cut underperformers and move onto your next test. 

• Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s worth noting that there’s no magic to the 80/20. Feel free to pick allocations that work for you, and your risk tolerance. The idea is simply that a larger portion of your budget goes to conservative bets, and a smaller portion goes to speculative bets.

Why does this matter?

• You get more out of your marketing in the short-term.

• You can adjust faster when consumer behavior or your business context changes.

• You can find small, early wins to scale when the time is right.

6. Focus on Customer Marketing

Executives often think about customer marketing when marketing budgets tighten because of the allure of “free” channels like email, app and SMS. The reality is that if your customer marketing has been an afterthought, your growth has always been less sustainable than it could be. That typically becomes clear when the “grow at all costs” mentality is forced out the window, and teams are left scrambling for budget-friendlier, organic sources of growth.

Growth marketing doesn’t just mean acquisition marketing. Growth marketing is full lifecycle marketing — and sustainable growth comes from building sticky, deep customer relationships. If your retention and loyalty strategies haven’t been a focus, this is a better-late-than-never time to think about how to offer value and grow relationships with your customers.  

7. Be Ready to Seize Opportunities and Respond Quickly to Changes in the Landscape

Downturns don’t last forever, and you need to be ready to take advantage of the upturn when it comes. Companies that haven’t done the scenario planning and innovation prep work will lose out to competitors who have. This could mean being ready to re-enter paid channels before competitors and getting the first mover advantage. It could be investing in your marketing process and technology so you reduce your speed to market and improve your data feedback loops to drive performance lifts. 

Need help updating your marketing strategy to weather the downturn and emerge as a leader? Let’s talk.