Best Practices to Ensure Smooth Marketing Operations in Challenging Situations

Marketing is considered a prime prerequisite and enabler for growing demand and revenue in most companies. Cutting back completely or reducing marketing operations during a challenging economic environment may cause business owners to lose on the scope of revenue generation and growth. 

Crises demand businesses to increase demand generation to produce new opportunities and maintain the sales funnel during changing market conditions.

Importance of Running Marketing Operations in Challenging Situations

Marketing operations may involve large amounts of spending and long-drawn-out processes. That’s why marketing leaders should plan for adaptability by optimizing their marketing tactics to protect the business. In times of challenging economy, marketing operations may seem inessential, but it is the opposite. 

Strategic marketing operations can lead businesses to understand and predict changing consumer behaviors and adopt strategies to improve digital engagement with them in low-cost and innovative ways. These changing times are vital for marketers to identify unique customer behaviors and group them into proper segments.

Leverage customer insights to know about customers, such as customer identities, previous purchases, transactions, web browsing behavior, social media engagement patterns, related products, product information search criteria, and interactions with your brands via emails and other channels.

Based on these customer insights, you can create personalized campaigns with relevant information, resources, and offers to give value to customers and boost positive engagement with them across various devices, platforms, and stages of the customer journey.

How Should Your Campaign Tactics Evolve and Adapt to the New Normal Lifestyles of Customers?

Not only preparing for an economic downturn, you, as a business owner or marketing leader, must start implementing strategies optimized for sustainable revenue growth during challenging times. Although most marketers assume that hard times call for hard sell with aggressive sales and marketing pitch. 

However, hard times are not about excessively focusing on sales, but about building faith in your brand and building opportunities. 

Without steady growth of opportunities in the sales funnel, there will be no scope in conversion and revenue generation. We recommend these four marketing actions or strategies for navigating your marketing operations through troubled times:

1. Anticipate Consumer Needs

Social distancing is causing anxiety, boredom, stress, and an augmented feeling of loneliness. It is imperative to identify these typical consumer needs to address those with your solutions, products, and services. For example, Audible, the audiobook service from Amazon, is targeting remote working parents to help them engage their kids who are at home after closing down schools and colleges. 

Marketers should witness and identify customers’ changing purchase behavioral patterns, social media and email usage, and website usage to understand newly emerging consumer patterns. 

Tracking usage data and real-time insights lets marketers predict consumers’ needs that can guide them to create impactful, engagement-driven campaigns, and communications with consumers. Thus, you can create opportunities in tough times to develop meaningful connections with customers and their trust in the brand.

2. Leverage Marketing Technologies

The challenge of meeting customer needs and serving them with relevant and useful resources is essential to keep people engaged with the brand, especially when they are grappling with the fear of uncertainty and economic crisis. 

E-commerce businesses are overloaded with a massive volume of online orders, shortage of stocks, strategies to prioritize essential products, contactless delivery procedures, and at the same time, ensuring employees’ health.

Therefore, marketing efforts should be revised by keeping the impact of COVID-19 on the targeted audience’s lifestyles, and the overall business, in mind. You can make use of marketing systems to monitor customers and build personalized connections with them to keep them engaged. 

Schedule communications with your customers using automation technology to send relevant messages at the right time, to the right segment of customers. 

Automation platforms enable integrating omnichannel marketing activities to target your customers via email marketing, retargeting ads, mobile marketing, social media marketing, paid campaigns, account-based marketing, and other low-budget marketing strategies. 

Planned and periodic campaign planning with automation platforms can help you avoid missed emails or messages. Thus, automation technology assists marketers in eradicating common human errors and ensures timely delivery and campaign execution.

3. Be Consistent With Your Digital Presence

The amount of time people are spending on their mobile devices and digital services platforms had increased considerably when social distancing and nationwide lockdowns took effect. They are heavily focused on online platforms to learn new skills, seek solutions, stream entertainment, engage with social media channels to stay connected with the world, and use e-commerce services for all types of purchases. 

Though COVID-19 has led to digital marketing disruption, you need to keep your marketing plans optimized and running to improve customer reach.

With increased reliance on e-commerce portals during COVID-19, some brands may notice elevated purchasing patterns similar to Cyber Monday and Black Friday. That said, you can restructure budgets for marketing campaigns to enhance consumers’ reach on channels where they are most active, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.   

Marketers are reallocating more of their ad spend on email marketing, paid campaigns, and social media advertising in 2020 than they did in 2019 to keep customers connected to their brand. 

The number of marketers relying on digital marketing channels is only expected to rise as people continue to remote work and stay indoors.

Take Advantage of Marketing Services to Improve Campaign Execution

As the economic downturn hits, the first thoughts that management has are downsizing the marketing department and reducing marketing activities. Although cutbacks in these areas sound like a logical approach, reducing these activities can be a big mistake as they start losing out on customer connection. 

You may freeze the hiring of expert talent to reinforce your marketing operation, but you can always seek outside help from an agency. Using marketing services during a recession can be a more viable option than hiring experts for in-house teams. 

Outsourcing to an agency will bring you a dedicated campaign execution and campaign management expert with flexible working hours, filling the current skill gap in your team with experienced, operational professionals.

Unlike onboarding and training in the case of a new in-house team hire, outsourced experts can start working on your campaigns right away without prior grooming sessions. Various benefits of outsourcing your marketing activities include –

• You can work with agencies that have reliable marketing contacts and background. Outsourced marketing experts can immediately show you the right strategies and techniques that are most effective in meeting your marketing and overall business goals.
  
  
• You will start getting actionable campaign results you expect from marketing efforts by deploying the enhanced experience of outsourced marketing experts.
  
  
• Campaign results and initiatives will be thoroughly monitored and analyzed by skilled marketing professionals and analysts to guide you on the scope of revenue expected from diverse types of marketing channels, initiatives, and marketing systems.
  
  
• A rockstar marketing agency with a wide array of strong connections can help you deliver your message, to the right segment of the audience, at the right time.
  
  
• By adding an already operational campaign management expert in your team, your team will start getting valuable guidance and resources on identifying the right customer profiles and the right strategies to engage them with your brand.

In addition to these aforementioned benefits of outsourcing your marketing campaign activities to an agency, you will also gain a marketing coach who can train your in-house team on the latest marketing tools and technologies, changing customer behavioral patterns, and the latest market research to come up with plans to adapt to changing marketing scenarios. 

There is more! Check out this detailed study on how outsourcing campaign execution services can be beneficial, more cost-efficient than in-house hiring, and drive your business growth during a crisis. You can ask us how you can benefit from every step of outsourced campaign execution services by navigating to our contact us page, or saying “Hi” or “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com, or chat with us via Facebook,  Twitter or LinkedIn.