What Tactics Work Best in a Recession?

The budget axe is falling. Marketers everywhere have to choose which campaigns and which channels survive. As a result there is a robust debate about which tactics work best and which channels are "must haves" versus the fun but expendable "nice-to-haves."

As usual, the decision often depends on the objectives marketers seek to achieve. In this environment, management wants low-cost, fast-acting and dependable ways to get attention, traffic, interaction and sales. Many branding and positioning initiatives get quickly sacrificed when cash runs short, even though the media for accomplishing these objectives is heavily discounted and subject to aggressive negotiation.

A key decision criterion seems to be the ability of a campaign or a media channel to convert a prospect into either an active lead or a sale. Viewed through this lens countless blog readers and Facebook friends become more of an abstraction and less of a measurable means to deliver business value. Ironically many of the highly hyped tactics -- online PR, web video marketing, Twitter and social media marketing --  are sorted OUT because of their limited track record in delivering quantifiable results. Though today they are cheap enough and accessible enough for marketers with a few extra bucks and some extra imagination to use creatively and break through to hard-to-reach customer or prospect segments.

Search (both SEO and PPC) and e-mail are the work horses in a recession. The costs are containable, the targeting can be quickly and effectively tweaked plus the ROI has been proven again and again.They are sufficiently interactive to meet "social" marketing needs and can be deployed almost on-demand to suit anxious CFOs.

Another recession-centric focus is on current customer bases and CRM tools. This starts with the notion that its easier and cheaper to sell more to existing customers than to seek out and persuade new ones. But a farming versus hunting orientation depends on the agile use of data, since one-size-fits-all campaigns against a house list rarely meet expectations. In looking to upgrade CRM capabilities marketers have to assess the incremental lift of improved data mining versus the incremental cost and total ownership costs of systems or software.

As more and more marketers hunker down, look for inventive uses of the tactics that work. And keep an eye out for wacky experiments to try to break through to new audiences or to road test emerging channels. 

Comments

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[Terence Chan]

Great read, Danny. Perhaps instead of looking at channels as individual components to be, or not be, fed - shouldn't we be looking at media-neutral engagement programs that span from upstream to downstream and back? As the only sensible budgeting basis for what is now and truely a cross-platform consumption world?

Granted, such an orchestrated approach is being gagged by agencies traditional and new because it doesn't support their channel-led command and control setups nor their biased bottom line targets?

[Jeremy Dent]

Good points but, in some business categories, PPC rates on common keywords are inflated by two or three market leaders.

Digital PR is delivering solid results, particularly when based on solid buzz and sentiment monitoring. In markets with established leaders, Digital PR can exploit 'long tail' segments and offer leadership in niche markets.

There is a proven correlation between positive mentions online and sales levels for consumer markets and sales conversion rates in B2B markets.

You just have to build relevant worksheet models for clients.

Don't ignore email marketing either: Gartner and MarketingSherpa still give it the highest marketing communications ROI.

[Steven Woods]

Danny,
thanks for the post, it's an interesting read. I'm not sure though, that I agree that only the direct-to-lead tactics are the ones to keep in a recession. The buyer now has control of the information they need to buy, and the marketing tactics we use need to guide them along the buying process.

Many of those marketing tactics may not directly convert them to sales ready leads at that moment, but will help them move along the buying process. Many social media and blog tactics fit that category, and are ignored at a marketers peril.

I wrote a bit about the interation between social media and B2B demand generation here -
http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-media-and-b2b-marketing-6-things.html if you're interested in my slightly different take on the subject.