Running a business can feel like riding a roller coaster — it has its ups and downs and may have sudden plunges or immediate jumps. As a business owner, it is crucial to understand the challenges you may face along the way, even in a healthy economy. Your patience, determination, and skills as an entrepreneur will be put to the test especially in tough economic times. Right now, the economy is falling — we are all in a freefall, and it can feel disconcerting. You might need to consider using digital marketing best practices to help ensure that your business stays afloat and is able to survive an economic downturn.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had adverse impacts on many industries — staying indoors, working from home, and surfing the internet has become the new normal for many people. The problem is that none of us knows when this will end. That’s why it’s so important for companies to start looking for ways to deal with these economic challenges.
There are plenty of strategies that can help business owners like you drive up profits, even during an economic downturn. Here are some digital marketing best practices you can use during a recession:
Email marketing
One of the most cost-effective marketing channels you can use to build trust and loyalty among your customers is email marketing. When you own a business, it’s important to create a list of current customers as well as prospective customers. Eventually, you can use this information to gain insight into what your customers need, and it will help you speak to them directly as well. Through this list, you will deliver appropriate content to your customers and prospects, since you know who your target market is and how you engage best with your business.
You can segment and personalize your email list based on demographics, types of products, and services your customers need. You can take advantage of this email strategy that addresses your target audience’s specific needs, which can ultimately generate increased sales, even during this period of recession.
Re-marketing
During a recession, re-marketing can help you retain more customers. While cutting your marketing budget may seem like the most practical option, you need to know how your customers redefine value and react to the crisis accordingly. For a business to survive, it needs to develop a compelling value marketing strategy that provides value and helps retain customer loyalty.
Statistics show that during a recession, retaining existing customers is a lot cheaper for a business than finding new ones. The ability to anticipate opportunities, threats, and risks allows you to minimize the consequences better — foreseeing them, and planning corrective actions and strategies ahead of time.
Adjusting your pricing strategies
During a recession, consumers are forced to tighten their wallets and are more likely to be shopping around for the best deals. Cutting down drastically on your prices is not necessarily the first option; however, you may need to offer more price promotions temporarily, price smaller pack sizes more aggressively, reduce thresholds for quantity discounts, and/or extend credit to long-standing customers. This will attract more consumer support than regular promotions, such as mail-offers or sweepstakes.
Gather customer testimonials and user reviews
One of the essential components of any local SEO marketing strategy is customer reviews, and during a recession, this is truer than ever. Positive reviews and testimonials have the power to influence a new customer’s purchasing decisions since they significantly strengthen your company’s reputation.
As a business owner, you need to understand that a recession means that customers’ trust and confidence are low. Few people are shopping and looking for products and services. To make matters worse, many are anxious about making a mistake with whatever limited purchase they make.
With that in mind, you need to do everything you can to ensure that you build trust and loyalty with your existing customers and prospects. You need to dedicate more time, effort, and energy so you can increase the number of testimonials and user reviews from previous and current customers, and leverage these reviews in all of your content marketing efforts to power your digital marketing strategies during an economic downturn.
Conclusion:
No one is ever adequately prepared for any economic downturn, but as a business owner, you will be faced with tough decisions as you experience the negative impacts of a recession. You may need to reduce your marketing budget, cut costs and expenses, and even lay off employees so your business can survive. This challenging time will put many businesses and entrepreneurs to the test, regardless of the type of industry they’re in. With so many factors out of your control, remember that there are still digital marketing best practices you can use to survive in this difficult economic situation.
To learn more about these strategies, feel free to contact us and speak with our team of expert and professional marketing consultants about the options available to you.
