Recession Marketing Planning
A 2009 Survey (”Global Power Industry Outlook to 2010: Marketing & Sales Strategies and the Impact of Recession and Recovery”) found that 61% of industry players are looking to increase their marketing expenditures this year and only 19% plan on decreasing. Over half of all respondents say that the demonstration of confidence can give their company the edge it needs to succeed. To meet their client’s cost pressures, 27% of companies are changing their product portfolios. Here are some tips to help with your marketing planning during the recession.
“If firms blatantly go out and increase their spending on marketing, a lot of them are going to fail,” warns Dr. Gary Lilien, author of a Penn State study about recession business marketing planning. He says successful firms need three characteristics in order to succeed during an economic downturn. First, he says, “You need a marketing emphasis. You can’t all of the sudden start focusing on marketing… but if you know how to do it, if you had a marketing emphasis before, that’s one characteristic.” He adds that companies also need to have the guts to increase marketing. “You need the will to do it, which is characterized in our research by an entrepreneurial culture, a willingness to say, ‘Things are getting bad, should we push harder?’ Firms with entrepreneurial culture are used to doing that,” says Dr. Lilien. Lastly, you need the capital. “The technical term is slack resources, in other words, having the budget to do it. Even if you have the first two, a marketing emphasis and an entrepreneurial culture, it’s risky. Make sure you’ve got the resources to do it,” he said. “The firms that had all three characteristics did very well in a recession. But firms that are missing any one of them, they’re in trouble. Frankly, most firms in our analysis cut their [marketing] budget in a recession.”
Since the dawn of computers, email has become a staple in any marketing planning budget. Since it costs so little and is seen as such a great return-on-investment, it only makes sense. The Email Census 2009 report published by Econsultancy and Adestra found that 78% of respondents rate email as “excellent” or “good” for return-on-investment and better than any other digital marketing channel. Econsultancy Research Director Linus Gregoriadis said: “The research shows that email is a crucial weapon for marketers during the recession because, when used properly, it delivers excellent return on investment and compares very favorably to other digital marketing channels.” In the outgoing marketing newsletters and emails, 58% are based on retention and 42% are based on acquisition.
Marketing planning during a recession often involves online content creation, which is a low-cost way to get your brand name out there and establish yourself as a credible, trusted leader in your field. Many businesses order professional copy in the form of promotional articles that use keywords and inbound links, press releases that announce news and establish credibility, blogs that pull in large amounts of web traffic, informative newsletters to retain subscribers, and internal pages that make a business’s website more search engine friendly. Today, content is king and the company that provides web users with valuable, insightful information will persevere through the toughest times.
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