What Marketing to do in a recession?...

One month ago, the UK was officially announced in recession and although this sounds really scary, the truth is the economy is ‘unprecented’ and a recession can affect us all differently. With that in mind, and to give you some more upbeat news, this blog post aims to help you firmly position your business into the market and restore your confidence.

Whilst you are probably considering reducing your marketing spend, we would 100% advise against it. If anything, it would be a good idea to increase marketing spend. This doesn’t necessarily mean spending on the same marketing as before, but more changing and adapting with the times. To understand where to invest your budget, firstly you will need to look at your insights & analytics to understand where your customers hang out and what platform it is worth you invest time and money in to.

What insights & analytics should you be looking for?

1. Google Analytics

This platform provides valuable insights that can help shape your business success strategy. It allows you to study your online business as a whole and helps you better understand your customers behaviour, in terms of; What traffic source they have come from, what geographical area you are targeting, What social media platform is performing the best for you, What landing pages are the most popular and the amount of time customers are spending on your website.

All of these factors are essential knowledge to growing your business and ensuring that your online presence is working to it's best ability.

In addition to Google Analytics, The G+ Suite also includes; Google Adwords and Google My Business. The Google My Business profiles are fantastic insights on your search presence and understanding how customers are finding you. Google Adwords are relevant if you wish to pay Google to rank your website higher, or if you wish to carry our retargeted marketing (you know the cool stuff, when you visit a website and then the item follows you around the rest of your internet journey!?)

Google Analytics will help you discover what changes you need to make and is definitely the most comprehensive tool.

2. Social Media

All Social Media platforms have their own built-in analytics and on a monthly basis its good to take note of your performance, to both compare against previous months and to also see what needs tweaking for better results. The functions you should be looking for are:

- Number of followers/ likes you have (how much has this increased from last month?)

- Post Engagement

- Post Reach

- Post Comments

By searching for this data, you will understand what social media platforms work for your business and ways in which you can improve other platforms. It will also give you a good indication on the type of content your customers typically prefer.

3. Email

Look through your email system and take note of the email templates you have sent out, how many customers have opened it, how many emails have bounced, how many customers have unsubscribed and what was the click through results on any links you included?

Email Stats are powerful insights to improve your email marketing strategy and create better performing campaigns, that generate results.

Will this data help you drive better Marketing?

YES!!! You will have the knowledge on how your website, social media and email platforms are performing. By knowing what needs improving, you can alter your campaigns and focus on what needs doing to drive maximum success. For example, if your website landing pages need re-designing for a lower bounce rate, or your social media needs more creative content or your email needs more stand-out links for higher click-through's, then you will know all of this when you do your monthly report.

Data is essential to drive your Marketing forward...

What Marketing should we be doing during the recession?

Understandably your market are uncertain and it's likely your previous strategy has come to a halt. Because of this, any automated campaigns you had set up should be stopped. You do not want to wrong message going out during this slow turn. Your customers may not need what was in demand yesterday. Your business may be able to offer something different which suits them right now. It's time to INNOVATE.

A Marketing Strategy is always important and you should have created a new one to reflect the current economy and planned your new content. You want to be sure that your brand is still top of your customers mind and they are still seeing your social media posts.

Focus on your core customer concerns and address them through creative valuable content.

Each business will weather this storm differently and if you approach your Marketing in 3 stages, you have the chance to leap ahead of the competition. These stages are:

1. Strategy Pivot

2. Growth Plan

3. Accelerate Revenue

If you are at a loose end and you are not sure what direction to take with your business following the UK recession, please do get in touch and take advantage of my FREE POWER HOUR!

Email hi@gemmediamk.com