When the going gets tough, it’s usually the marketing budget that takes the hit. If we take a look at the pandemic and its impact on businesses across the world, CEOs and business leaders everywhere tightened their purse strings and pulled back on unnecessary spending.
What they unsuccessfully failed to identify was that the marketing budget doesn’t and shouldn’t have fallen into that category. What this did was create a gap in the messaging for businesses in a time where this exact messaging was what was keeping their customers and users engaged.
Whilst the pandemic posed one of the biggest threats to business that we’ve seen in over a decade, knowing how to prioritise your marketing budgets during volatile times is a key piece of information for every business’ arsenal. But how can that be done? We’ve broken down some of the key ways to make it happen.
Table of Contents
Re-establish your goals
When a turbulent time hits, it’s human instinct to go into panic mode. Whilst we wouldn’t ask you not to panic (apart from the fact that it’s probably impossible not to), by re-establishing the goals you can keep on track and ensure that everything is okay to proceed.
You’ll really be able to figure out what impact this is going to have on the business and where you might be able to prioritise your budget to ensure it has as little impact as possible. Maybe, whatever it might be, is forcing your customers to get their information digitally: how can you reach them? Would it make better commercial sense to put some spend behind social ads, rather than in newspapers and magazines?
By re-establishing your goals, you’ll be able to clearly see what you’re trying to achieve, and where your budget will be best placed.
Invest in learning
Through all of your marketing collateral, you’re communicating with potential customers. And, during volatile times, your customer persona might change, meaning that your marketing might have to evolve too.
You can improve your chances of making more sales and gaining more customers if you know your potential customers on a much deeper level – who are they, how old are they, how much do they earn, what is their disposable income, how do they consume information, etc.?
To find out this data, you have to invest in learning about your customers, which could be through surveys, quizzes, or focus groups. All of these methods can be fairly inexpensive whilst the returns are invaluable. This depth of information will instruct you on how to continue, and potentially adapt again should more volatile times present themselves in the future.
Your customers are your bread and butter. Use them!
Study your competitors
What are your closest competitors doing during this time? You might be able to look at historical data to see what they were up to in the past.
Similar to what you would do when launching your product/service, competitor analysis lets you see whether there is a market for you to fit into. During volatile times, you need to examine the landscape and spot the trends and goings-on to ensure you don’t fall short with your marketing budget.
Whilst you don’t want to produce an exact replica of what your competitors are doing, it will give you a good understanding of how you should proceed. You can also identify areas that require improvement or parts that they are lacking entirely – how do you move into that?
Diversify your marketing channels
There are many different marketing channels today. With the internet now being the medium where most consumers get their information, there are many strategies that can help you still reach them – even if your budget gets a small percentage cut.
There are channels such as SEO, content marketing, social media, branding, web design, SEM and much more. All of these would typically form part of your marketing ecosystem (read about ours here), but when you’re forced to make decisions on what works best, it might be beneficial to add a dash of diversity to the mix.
Luckily, it’s fairly easy to try channels and test how they work out for your business, whilst having the option to pull the plug if it’s not quite doing what it should do.
Bonus tip: Don’t spend all of your budget on a pretty website!
Our very own Jamie Love outlines this when he spoke to Exhibition News about the three biggest mistakes of marketing budgeting, he says: “There’s a lot more that goes into marketing than having a pretty website. It’s worth gaining a better understanding of the ecosystem that makes up growth marketing and how different channels are implemented before spending all of your money on a pretty website.”
Having spoken to hundreds of startups, the misunderstanding is that investing in a website would produce sales on its own, when it is only the base for kickingstarting that growth.
This is just an initial setup piece, and the focus needs amplifying later on – the spend is usually placed within the setup stage and clients have their hands tied when it comes to developing it further.
Begin with a simple website to develop your specified landing page, and then go to a more expensive one later on.
What’s the key to all this?
The most important part of this process is review, track and tweak.
To get the best performance and the optimum results considering the time, you must always review to see if it is contributing to the overall business goals (what we mentioned in the first point) and objectives.
It’s perhaps just as important, if not more so, to do this process when times are difficult. It’s dangerous to keep your eye off the ball and let things slide when you’re already going against the grain. How can your measure its success and efficiency if you’re not entirely sure what’s going on?
Some might consider it counterproductive to invest in a marketing agency during this time, but one key benefit of outsourcing the support is that agencies are typically well-equipped to go up against an unstable landscape. They will have the right tools and procedures in place to ensure the budget is spent wisely and implemented in the correct way, whilst you can continue doing other time-sensitive tasks.
At Monumental, we’ve seen and done it all, not least throughout the covid-19 pandemic. We pride ourselves on our ability to diversify, adapt and change at speed, which is a key part of navigating through any tricky situations.
Final thoughts
So, the next time you’re going against a hostile market, or are pre-empting one to happen in the near future, start thinking about where your marketing budget is going. Instead of cutting it altogether, as that would be disastrous, think about how to diversify and make use of what you’ve got.
Trust us, it’s doable. But if you’ve got any questions, feel free to get in touch.
