When layoffs start and business is tough, how should you approach marketing?
With layoffs continuing into 2024 and businesses tightening their purse strings to prepare for the potential of another rough financial year, marketing is oftentimes one of the first areas to go. A lack of knowledge can deem it a non-essential function or spend category. And depending on how you are running your marketing, this could be true. Perhaps you can become more efficient with your marketing?
During times like these, marketing jobs and marketing agencies see many shifts. If you are a business (or marketer looking to make yourself more valuable) here are a few marketing items that are essential to maintain, especially during a downturn, and how you can maintain them:
Customer Service Marketing
If you want to keep your customers and convince them you are valuable enough to keep paying, you better be responsive and efficient for them. What does this look like from a marketing perspective?
Your website should be up-to-date with all contact information a customer could need. Do not make them hunt for how to get in touch with you. If you are curious if your site accomplishes this, start with a mini audit to get your answer. (Message me with questions).
You need to have someone(s) dedicated to responding to customers across all platforms. A customer or potential customer should never be left hanging even if they reach out to you on socials. If you are going to be slow to respond, set up an automatic response and let them know what to expect.
Your team needs to know what to say for all types of questions or how to get that answer quickly. This usually means creating a guide of sorts for all potential customer questions.
Customer Loyalty Programs Are Dependent on Marketing
If you are fighting to keep your customers and clients, build content and experiences that matter to them and will show them the value you add to their lives. This may not be readily apart to you for every industry, but here are a few questions to answer to identify what they may need:
What is the pain point you are solving for them?
How could you create a more distinct value that they cannot get elsewhere?
What benefits do they get for remaining loyal to your business?
What loyalty programs are the most effective at keeping YOUR business as a customer or client and how can you apply those tactics to your business?
Customer's Need Access to Information. Also a Key Marketing Function.
If people are spending money with you, the expect access to information when they want it. They also want to know that you are an authority and that they made the right decision to spend money with you. This means keeping relevant content available to them and in front of them is key. Here’s the simplest and most minimal way to do that:
Create a library of 12 pieces of long form content (1 for each month of the year).
Schedule out the long form content to post on your website once per month.
Send an email to your contact list once that long form content is live (you can schedule this out too with many programs). For these emails, spend time creating a subject line that inspires someone to open it and tell them the hook quickly. Meaning, tell them why they want to read this piece of content from you, i.e. “what’s in it for them”.
Use content repurposing techniques to turn that long form content into 10+ bite size pieces to use on your social channels and schedule all of them out ahead of time. For questions on this, check out this resource: https://www.thebusinessofmarketing.co/product-page/content-repurposing-guide
Make sure you have someone who can respond to your customers via email and socials when they reach out to you about your content.
How is your business taking care of these items? The specifics will look different for every industry and every business, but the tactics should be similar.
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