When business is booming or you are expecting a busy season, it makes sense to invest more resources in marketing your business.

But what happens when sales are not as high? Do you keep on sustaining your marketing efforts? Do you scale down or stop altogether? This is a decision businesses across the world are making because of COVID-19 and its effect on everyone. But COVID, and we are not simplifying its effect on all, is an outside force that affects your business. And outside forces are something that you as a business owner deal with all the time.

You may believe that cutting down marketing costs is the better choice but we believe marketing smarter is the way to go.

What is Smarter Marketing?

Simply put smarter marketing is about being more strategic and agile when it comes to your marketing efforts.  It is taking the time to reevaluate what works and what hasn’t and more importantly making the hard decisions on where you need to invest your resources and time.  Smarter marketing includes:

• Evaluating where your revenue is coming from
• Getting to know your customer again.
• Updating your marketing plan and campaigns for the next few months
• Looking for more efficient and innovative ways of meeting the needs of your customers

Never Stop Evaluating

You hear all the time you have to look back to move forward and that time is now. Evaluating and taking time to if your marketing tactics are yielding results will help you realize a few things about your business.  First, it will help you realize where your leads are coming from and where you need to invest your time and resources.  It may yield holes in your sales process. You may learn that there your website isn’t capturing customer information Take the time to redo your SWOT Analysis and update your competitor analysis.  Are they spending more on marketing? Did they hire more marketing employees?

Reviewing where your revenue is coming from may cause an adjustment in your sales goals.

Take today’s market as an opportunity to get rid of what’s not working and start new tactics that will work.  Plus, the evaluation will help you understand your customers’ motivations.

Reinvest in Understanding your Customer

With an ever-changing environment, especially today, there is a chance that the needs, wants, and motivations of your customers have also changed. Yes, you can fall back on your loyal customers to keep your cash flow steady and it might be time to open up some new revenue streams but it might not.   Take a look at your user personas, your ideal customer profile and determine if their needs, frustrations, and buying patterns have changed. If so, then your marketing must change as well.

Trust us, any time you invest in understanding your customer afresh is not in vain.

Its Time to Invest in Digital Marketing

What we have seen from 2008 and 2020 is that online sales generally stay high during downturns.  In the recession of 2008, online spending only went down by 2% compared to a drastic drop in overall spending.

From our 2020 experience and the evaluation you probably found that your online sales have doubled. It is now time to rethink your digital marketing strategy. U.S. consumers spent $2.2 billion on Nov. 2, the day before the U.S. presidential election, a 31% year-over-year increase. And they spent $2.0 billion on Nov. 3, Election Day, which was a 27% jump year over year, according to data from Adobe Analytics. [1]

You have to get your marketing platforms ready to take advantage of online sales. Today is the day.  Whether you add a Chatbot to your site, update your Facebook messenger, add ALT TEXT images to your website, your marketing mission is to ALWAYS make it easier for your customers to find, engage and buy from you.

Here’s an article that gives you 42 trends to add to your digital marketing strategy.

Stay Marketing Agile

Our last piece of advice is to stay agile as you become smarter about your marketing.  Every day, we handle the smarter marketing process for our clients:

• Evaluate where their revenue is coming from
• Review and update their customers’ personas
• Continually tweak marketing campaigns
• And we always look for more efficient and innovative ways of meeting the needs of their customers.

That’s how we prove our value and show our ROI to our clients. But if you can’t hire us take the time to do it on your own.  But, do it. Marketing is fun and creative but it is also about your numbers, i.e., SALES. So, you don’t want to waste time, money or energy.

Be smart and don’t stop marketing your company and you will prevail over times like these.

[1] https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/coronavirus-impact-online-retail/