Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., is the Chief Marketing Officer for Simplus.
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2020 has been a doozy in every way, including economic upheaval related to the pandemic. According to a recent Forrester report, the current pandemic will lead to "deeper budget cuts with broader effects across the marketing ecosystem and broader economy." However, that same report advises against cutting back on your marketing because "study after study shows that going dark with marketing altogether hurts your chances of recovering well out of an economic downturn."
In other words, it's time to work smarter, not harder, with your marketing budget. Here are some ways we've seen our clients and others cut marketing costs while still reaching their audiences during the current pandemic.
Focus On Your Existing Clients
The single most important thing you can do as the pandemic presses on is to retain your current clients. According to a survey by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, 43% of respondents said "it's reassuring to hear from brands they know and trust." Another 40% "want to hear what brands are doing in response to the pandemic." Only 15% don't want to hear from brands during this time.
So start reaching out, and make your communications personal. Email is good, but phone calls, video messages or even videoconferences are better. Let them know what you're doing to get through the pandemic, and ask what they're doing. It's more than likely that they're also trying to cut costs; if so, you want to demonstrate that you can be part of their solution, not excess fat that needs to be trimmed.
Change All Events From In-Person To Digital
We recently helped one of our own clients make this transition. Prior to the pandemic, we'd helped the client commence a series of in-person, on-campus events for their target audience of young, expecting mothers. These events were huge sources of leads and were building in momentum, so it came as a blow when the pandemic forced the state to restrict and then cancel large group gatherings.
Rather than call it quits, we proposed continuing the event series by moving online with Facebook Live. Doing so had multiple benefits. First, we were able to continue to build on the momentum of the in-person events. In our client's most recent event, we collected nearly 60 forms from attendees, more than twice the number of leads from the in-person events. Second, Facebook Live events serve as residual lead sources. Unlike in-person events, Facebook Live events are viewable long after they've ended, meaning interested parties can still find, enjoy and act upon them for months to come, yielding leads while the client engages in other activities.
Move Your Resources To Email Advertising
If ever there were a time to perfect your email strategy, it is now. Not only are we more reliant on digital communication, but consumers are more responsive to marketing emails than they were before the pandemic. According to Mailchimp, "By March 25, almost all industries saw an increase in engagement compared to their previous year's average." Those Mailchimp users who were tracking their engagement "began to see a steady increase in click and open rates, accompanied by a decrease in unsubscribe rates, compared to their previous year's average."
Use Referral Marketing
We all know that the average consumer is more likely to believe a friend's recommendation than a business pitch. Today, word-of-mouth marketing is especially important for businesses as consumers spend more time on their screens and devices than ever before.
If you've been cultivating your relationship with your customers, you're in the right place to focus on referral marketing, and it can be done at a relatively low price. For example, one of our clients has offered customers cash and discount incentives to refer friends and family, with those incentives being contingent on a successful transaction. They've seen incredible results, with more sales than before they began the offering.
Repurpose Old Content
If your business is in the practice of putting out content in the form of blog entries, e-books, white papers or even just social media posts, then you already have a wealth of material to use for future marketing. Repurposing old content can take many forms: It can mean using an article as the basis for an instructional video or vice versa. It can mean rewriting that article to make it more applicable to current developments or a new location. It can mean mining emails and e-books for social media posts. Whatever form it takes, the principle is the same as that taught to us every year on Earth Day when we were children: Reduce, reuse, recycle.
One of our clients runs a website for each of its nearly 50 different properties, each with its own blog, for which the client tapped us to provide bimonthly articles. In order to cut down on costs, we proposed writing a handful of original articles, which our writers would then repurpose to create unique blog entries for each property's website, customized to the location. Doing so cut our monthly writing and proofing time by half, allowing us to do more while staying under budget. Not only that but on average, site traffic increased by 25% after the client started repurposing blogs.
With no way of definitively knowing when the pandemic will end, it's vital we all reassess where we are directing our marketing efforts. Work smarter, not harder, by focusing on current clients, switching to digital events, prioritizing email marketing, pursuing referrals and repurposing old content.
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