To some, a recession is “worst case scenario” news. They suddenly become fearful and wonder if they should siphon off all upcoming marketing campaigns. Yet, to others, a recession can be an opportune time to get their name out there while the competition pool shrinks! Marketing planning should be done carefully and conscientiously, with no money thrown to the wind, yet that doesn’t mean that risks can’t be taken. There are numerous strategies, depending on your target market. Some companies carefully promote their highest margin products to boost their short-term earnings, while others may focus on selling mass quantities of discounted items. Here are some ideas to create your new market plans.
“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.”
Despite the recession, some companies can arrange their marketing planning to get ahead, Dr. Lilien says. “Companies that run their business on customer intelligence; Amazon is the first that comes to mind. They understand their customers, they experiment with everything, and they’ve got resources,” he explains. “Companies like Amazon – I don’t think they’re going to cut back at all. This is a good opportunity for them to knock off some flies and probably pick up some relatively inexpensive acquisitions along the way. Companies that have been looking at marketing as an investment, and not an expense, and have been running their business through customer knowledge are the ones that are going to come out of this [recession] really, really well.”
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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