Bill Gates famously said, if your marketing is effective, you should not need to worry about marketing in a downturn, as it shouldn’t happen. Here are some tips to help with marketing in a downturn. I hope you find the tips helpful.
Marketing in a downturn
Here are our top 7 tips for getting the most value from your content marketing in a downturn:
1. Know your Audience
When marketing in a downturn, more people are involved in approving every B2B purchase. Each buyer often has a different personality type. The buying committee usually includes senior decision-makers who will not understand (or want to understand) the technical nuances of your product or service. Knowing who’s likely to be on the committee will help you to produce content targeted at the right level in the organization.
2. Plan your Content
Armed with this knowledge, you can plan and create content that targets prospects at each stage in the buying cycle. In the early stages, prospects may just be researching around a problem or business issue, rather than actively looking for a specific solution. You can capture their attention and goodwill by producing helpful content, sharing some of your expertise in how to approach a relevant problem – but not (yet) trying to sell the idea of buying your product.
Later, when your prospects are better qualified and actively engaged with your organization, you can roll out more targeted content, providing case studies, demonstrations, webinars and other materials that clearly show how your product or service can resolve the business issues you know your prospect has.
3. Re-Use and Re-Purpose
Relevant, high-quality content is key to nurturing cautious buyers through an extended decision-making process. Look for ways you can re-use and repurpose existing content across different channels and platforms, to maximize its reach and make it relevant at different stages in the buying cycle.
4. Optimize Content for Inbound Marketing
Your prospects are no longer (if they ever were) waiting for you to drop a brochure in the mail or an eblast into their inbox. They’re on Google searching for answers to their questions, they’re reading blog posts, downloading eBooks, clicking on links to interesting things on Twitter, watching videos and asking peers for their opinions.
The good news for B2B marketers in a downturn is that inbound marketing costs far less than traditional outbound marketing, so it pays to make sure your content is optimized to be found by search engines and shared via social media. And if you have useful content locked up behind registration pages and customer login screens, now may be the time to incorporate them into your content marketing mix.
5. Don’t Forget Video
Many cost-conscious marketers shun video because of the perception that it’s expensive. But while a lavish video case study may cost thousands to produce, other forms of video can be just as valuable to your target audience and cost very little, or even nothing but your time.
You could record your internal product experts demonstrating a useful feature of your product, or film your presentation at an event. An informal video interview with one of your senior execs on a hot industry topic can show how your organization understands what’s happening in the market.
6. Become a Distributor as well as a Publisher
Good content marketing means becoming a distributor as well as a publisher. It’s no good spending money on creating an eBook or white paper if no one knows it exists. You need to get your content out to all the places where your target audiences are likely to see it.
Today, anyone, with any size of budget, can be a distributor, thanks to the ubiquity of social media. Updated your blog? Tweet about it with a brief summary. Created a useful ebook? Link to it in a LinkedIn post, or a Facebook update. Gave a presentation at an event? Share it on Slideshare.
Which brings us to our final tip:
7. Track Everything – and Change What’s Not Working
It’s never been easier to analyze the success of your marketing initiatives, including concrete ROI based on leads, opportunities and conversions. With the latest marketing ROI analytics, you don’t have to wait for a campaign to finish before you start looking at the results – you can watch its impact in real time. That means if a campaign’s not working, you can kill it and reallocate the budget elsewhere – ensuring you don’t waste any money on tactics that aren’t delivering a tangible return.
How ProAptivity can help you with marketing in a downturn.
ProAptivity are an independent CRM solutions provider with over 30 years experience in helping clients successfully onboard user-customisable CRM solutions. We focus on the implementation, training, and support of highly customised CRM software solutions. Our CRM software supported by our training provide customers with the tools needed to deliver successful business process management.
Fundamentally, we help organisations embed CRM best practice throughout their organisation. This helps organisations become more competitive, customer focused and ultimately more profitable.
If you need help in understanding why my business needs CRM, maybe some of our video’s or eBooks could help! Alternatively visit Maximizer CRM for more information. You can contact us today on 0330 223 6362 or via email at info@proaptivity.com. Contact us today for a free CRM consultation that will assess if your business is CRM ready.
