When times are hard, the instinct for most businesses is to cut the seemingly non core activities such as digital marketing. In order to save costs, marketing budgets get slashed and plans are shelved. It is a seemingly natural thing for a company to do.
But it’s during the difficult times that marketing is most important and also most effective. Marketing is a function that does not affect operations in the immediate nature but it does affect the future dramatically. The knee jerk reaction to cut costs pays off in the short term but is disastrous in the long term.
The fact is that when times are tough, it is important to double down on your digital marketing. Here are some reasons why digital marketing works well even in difficult times and you need to ensure that your company invests in it.
Compared to traditional marketing methods, digital marketing gives razor sharp control over your spend. These can be adjusted on an almost daily basis to match the customer usage patterns and the targeting can also be fined tuned to a large extent. With the click of a mouse the budgets can be adjusted. Daily, even hourly fine tuning is possible over your campaigns.
The live data coming in from your various digital marketing initiatives can give you an up-to-date and accurate picture of how your campaigns are affecting the market. This allows you to fine-tune, target and segment much more accurately. This is crucial to leverage razor thin budgets and cut out wastage.
It’s easy to get distracted by flavor of the day ideas when things are going great and budgets are not an issue. Hard times however make you pay attention. They make you want the biggest bang for your buck. Your attention is only on the sure thing and the proven strategies and experimentation is not an option. This reduces wastage of money and resources drastically and gives your efforts a keen edge.
A difficult market acts like a natural business pesticide. It eliminates the weak, the non-serious and the unprofessional. What are left are the tougher deeply committed companies such as yours. At such times the marketing humdrum and noise reduces and your messaging is more clearly heard by the target audiences without distractions. Being among the last players standing can be powerful signal to prospective customers that you mean business, in any market.
Be brave, be committed. Sticking it out and keeping your marketing going during the hard times not only pays off in the short term but you emerge much stronger in the long term.
