Every business goes through hard times. During these periods, it’s natural for business owners to investigate how to reduce costs and boost profit margins.
For those businesses that can still operate and have an accessible or willing customer base, then cutting marketing spend, from SEO to Google Ads, can be a mistake. Marketing is the lifeblood of a business because it brings in new sales, new customers, and new profit streams. Marketing is the only way that people know that your business exists.
Managing marketing budgets effectively
Loyal customers are one of your main and enduring sources of cash flow and organic growth. Ultimately, marketing isn’t an optional ‘nice to have’ but an essential tool for bringing in revenue.
Despite this, companies still often cut marketing spend disproportionately in times of trouble, but businesses need to make sure that they can distinguish between the necessary and the wasteful.
Making sure that you have built and are maintaining a strong brand identity that customers can trust is one of the best ways to reduce impact on your business.
For example, companies with strong brands like Colgate-Palmolive and Johnson & Johnson have fared better in recessions than those with lesser-known brands.
What can you do to boost marketing results?
The American Business Press reports that companies who continue to market themselves during hard times actually grow 4x faster than other companies. Therefore, instead of axing your marketing spend, you should be thinking of new, more efficient and creative ways that marketing methods will reach out to your potential customers.
For example:
- Introduce a “customer of the week” social post
- Set up a referral programme that gives customers or members rewards for every new customer they bring you
- Reach out to former customers or old leads
- Release a press release about your business’ vital work with a local customer
- Host something low-cost but high-yield for charity
- Amp up or revive email newsletters which will keep your brand in people’s minds and give you an opportunity to share tips, ideas, and resources that provides value
- Tweak your best performing and worst performing webpages to get more traffic and conversions
- Publish more blogs or reshare best-performing blogs on social media
- Run promotions and offers
- Create and share interesting and relevant infographics, fact lists, and videos
Great marketing generates great ROI
The good news is that tough times give businesses a good opportunity to cut poor performing or ineffective tactics. It’s a great time to throw away any dusty and inefficient marketing efforts and to creatively search for superior solutions to customer needs.
Also, if you are doing your own marketing, you may not be getting the best results for your money. Whilst it might save critical capital by keeping marketing in-house, your return on investment will be lower than with a professional marketing agency if you’re not well versed in this area. As the old saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.
That’s why now may be the perfect time to delegate your marketing to an expert. Here at Bigwave, we have a specialist team of marketers who can create websites, write newsletters, manage social media, increase website conversions, craft press releases, run PPC campaigns, and meet any other marketing need that you might have. Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help you through uncertain times.