Marketing In a Down Economy
Though the severity, depth and timing of any economic softening remains up for some debate, that doesn’t mean that chief marketing officers should sit idly by and wait for the debate to settle. Four strategic imperatives can help shelter the marketing function from a downturn of any size and scope, and better prepare it for rapid growth when the curve turns northward again.
ONE: MARKET DATA
Over the past six years, many marketing functions have made significant strides not only in their contribution to the business, but in their ability to reliably gather data and information that can be used to show why slashing marketing spend is the last thing their organizations should do in tough times.
Customer attitudes/satisfaction: By collecting insight on customer attitudes and behaviors, you can help to determine whether the slowdown so widely trumpeted in the mainstream news is affecting your corner of the world. You can assess their attitudes about your offerings, and their current satisfaction levels. You may find you won’t likely be dragged down as much as the herd, and overcorrecting in terms of greatly reducing spend would result in an awful lot of opportunity lost.
Market intelligence: Syndicated and primary research for the marketplaces you are currently targeting can help shed light on whether those markets will suffer more or less as a result of general softening.
Demand creation/pipeline: Many b-to-b organizations have begun to track an overall demand funnel from cold to close incorporating both demand creation and sales pipeline metrics. The data now pouring out of these funnels can help business forecast slowdowns long before deals stall or turn into losses in the historically sales-dominated portion of the pipeline.
TWO: RETENTION
While marketers have grown accustomed to the majority of their efforts to be focused around selling to new prospects, in a slowdown it is critical to keep what you already have, and use this base as a key target for continued growth.
Segmentation/marketing mix: A down economy requires additional work with sales to determine which segments and specific customers are in trouble; on the flip side, opportunities for growth as a result of conditions should also be identified.
Account-based marketing: For accounts with significant retention challenges, developing account-specific marketing plans and assigning dedicated marketing resources to the cooperative execution of these plans with sales can be very effective.
THREE: SALES ALIGNMENT
Marketers in a down economy that work hard to draw their function even closer toward sales have a better chance not only to survive, but to thrive.
Marketing sourced pipeline: Closely monitoring the percentage of sales pipeline uniquely driven by marketing, as well as the organization’s pipeline-to-quota ratio is critical in any economy, but takes on new meaning in one that is slowing.
Sales playbooks: A sales playbook takes an often-overwhelming amount of marketing-created information and distills it into a series of “plays” that can be applied to help facilitate specific stages of buying processes for specific audiences within target markets.
FOUR: MARKET POSITIONING
One of the marketing areas that can suffer the most during a down economy is reputation, due to its general difficulty of measurement and activities that were often unlinked to other marketing efforts. But such a blanket reduction in funding will undoubtedly hurt your demand creation efforts, as it is the influencers in your markets that do the best job convincing constituents that certain projects, products and services are truly need-to-haves.
Public relations: Develop a map of key press targets, feeding them customer stories of cost savings and innovative productivity demonstrated by your customer base, or perhaps showing information from a user conference that highlights customers bucking the recession/slowdown trend.
Analyst relations: Analysts often play a significant role at the beginning of buying cycles (helping their clients determine which problems they should solve) and toward the end of these cycles (helping differentiate vendors from one another).
Social media: Social media is now a way of life for many b-to-b marketers and salespeople. Blogs are a perfect example of the way that traditional media and new media are crossing, as influential bloggers should be identified, targeted, fed content, data and observations even in advance of traditional media to cause buzz prior to mass release. By positioning yourself as a peer to your buyers, you become a go-to outlet for information on a regular basis.
If there is one theme that crosses all four of these key areas, it is to be proactive. Plan and communicate well enough, and that CFO might just go knocking on someone else’s door.
