Marketing in a Recession: The Complete Guide for Businesses

Anthony Frasca

Statistics prove that the two most popular online activities are social media and video viewing. This is likely the reason that 96% of B2C and B2B marketers around the globe use Facebook.

If you worry about marketing in a recession, don’t. A recession is not the time to decrease your digital marketing budget. Instead, you should be more effective with your digital marketing efforts and increase spending.

Recessions are a great time for building brand loyalty.

Before you consider shrinking your marketing efforts, inspect what is working. Recessions are the perfect time for updating marketing strategies with more innovative approaches. Here is why.

Build Customer Loyalty

Marketing businesses online to existing customers is often simpler and more effective than bringing in new customers. That is why you should target loyal customers during a recession. It starts with showing you appreciate them.

Keep in touch regularly. Email and text are great ways to do this. You do not need to outright sell either every time you send a message, but add value to surveys, helpful articles, and positive messages.

Coupons and special deals are brilliant, too. Continually marketing to customers during a recession shows the stability of your brand. You are letting your loyal customers know you are here to stay, even when times get tough.

Monitor Your Competitors

Before you update marketing strategies, you will want to see what the competition is doing. Does it appear that they cut their budget? Plus, how are your competitors currently communicating with your target market?

If competitors are cutting back, this is the perfect opportunity to push forward and get ahead. However, this does not mean you need to make drastic changes, either. Instead, this is the time to fine-tune and be consistent.

Types of Marketing in Digital Media

The best part of creating a digital marketing budget is that, with digital, you can get solid metrics. You can measure the results, determining your ROI for what you spend. This way, when you see your efforts are effective, you can change the digital marketing budget, allocating more toward where you see success.

There are eight types of marketing in digital, which are as follows.

Affiliate marketing
Content marketing
Email marketing
Marketing analytics
Mobile marketing
Pay-per-click
Search engine optimization
Social media marketing

Not only can you track these methods, but you can easily tailor messaging. There are greater opportunities for customization so you can reach anyone who may be interested in your product or solution.

The Importance of Social Media Marketing

It’s a critical component of digital marketing strategies. In fact, statistics show people spend approximately 145 minutes daily on their social media accounts. You want to be where your customers are.

Unfortunately, a common issue is creating posts without a strategic, integrated approach. Effective social media marketing is about more than creating posts and responding to comments.

Consistency Is Key

Social media marketing must be consistent and coordinated. There are many social media tools available that help with scheduling and automation, however, you do not want an “autopilot” approach either. If there is no real thought behind your posts, the audience watching it will catch on, and will not care about what you are posting.

Further, social media marketing should never be in a silo, working separately from others, including the wider marketing team and departments outside of marketing. All platforms must show a consistent brand message, which means coordination of the entire brand and its people.

When you create a strategy for your approach, do not forget about the data. Analyzing the performance of your posts will help you better understand what is performing well, and how to implement more of your highly effective posts in the mix.

Search Engine Optimization

When marketing is in a recession, this is a tremendous opportunity to take the time and boost your SEO ranking. Recent findings suggest that 57% of small to medium-sized businesses lack an SEO strategy.

SMBs often overlook their SEO strategy because they do not have the time to dedicate to it. Also, often they do not understand the algorithms of today. This is the time to seek the help of experts and include this in your digital marketing budget.

However, there are things you can keep in mind and work on internally. Here is what to remember for SEO.

Bonus Tip: It costs $0 to ask your customers for reviews on Google and other review websites. These reviews are not only a big keyword ranking factor with search engines (authority & trust), but they also establish and reinforce social proof.

Start asking your customers or clients for these reviews as part of a best practice in your marketing program.

Content Indexing

For search engines to pick up your site, they need to read it clearly. This means adding text transcripts for any audio or video content you have and adding alt text for images.

Good Link Structure

Search engines also “crawl” your website, and they want to see that you have a structure that makes it simple to locate content. Partnering with an SEO expert means they will help you with formatting URLs, links, and sitemaps.

Keywords

A keyword is a term you want a user to search for on a search engine and find you. This means adding good, relevant keywords in the content throughout your website. This creates the foundation of your SEO.

“Stuffing” content with keywords will only do more harm than good. Rather, you need good quality content which contains the keyword in the header and a few times in the text itself. For algorithms, this is a better practice.