In 30 seconds:
- A new age of recession marketing is upon us – and it’s tricky for brands to navigate.
- Marketing activities need to be carefully planned and carefully targeted to your customer base to make sure they have impact – and are worth the cost.
- Knowing how to increase sales during a recession will spell the difference between brands who survive and those who don’t. We’re sharing how influencers can help.
Recession marketing – it’s not easy.
When old and new customers alike are keeping a closer eye on their budgets, proving why your brand is worth the spend is harder than ever.
It doesn’t help that marketing budgets are slimming down, too. Ensuring proper optimisation of your marketing spend will be vital for continued brand growth. That means planning your campaigns to get the maximum bang for your buck – which, as every marketer knows – is half of the battle.
But, have hope! Whatever your advertising budget, there’s an influencer out there for you.
Working with influencers is a cost-saving way of spreading brand messaging to a wider audience. If done right, influencer marketing can have a huge impact on both brand awareness and brand sentiment; both of which are going to be hugely important during any time of tough market conditions.
In fact, influencers are already at the centre of online marketing. We know that 97% of highly lucrative consumer group Gen Z uses social media as their top source of shopping inspiration, and that 72% of them follow influencers. Not only that, but 70% have said that user-generated content is ‘helpful’ when they’re making a purchase decision – highlighting the trust granted to influencers by their audiences.
That’s exactly why influencers are well worth budgeting into your marketing plan. We’re running through the best ways to use them, and how to devise a winning marketing strategy that helps to increase sales during a recession.
Why is marketing important in a recession?
During a recession, or general economic downturn (like a pandemic), it’s often marketing budgets which are the first to come under fire.
Brands can be tempted to halt marketing activities as a cost-saving initiative – or, sometimes, just because they don’t quite know what their brand can say to reach customers who are anxious about their spending habits.
But the answer to ‘What happens to marketing in a recession?’ and ‘What should happen to marketing in a recession?’ is very different.
Research has found that continuing to actively market your brand when a recession hits can have huge benefits – both in the short-term, and into the future. Here’s why recession marketing is so important:
1. It keeps brand awareness high
During the last recession in 2008, Millward Brown shared evidence that 60% of the brands who went ‘dark’ saw both brand use and brand image decrease – by 24% and 28% respectively.
This resulting downturn in their market share of voice meant that they were at greater risk of share loss, potentially causing issues well into the future.
On the flip side, those competitors who did not cut their advertising budget maintained a higher level of control over their market share of voice, positioning them in a stronger place both during and after the period of economic downturn.
2. It helps brands stay resilient
With a good level of marketing investment, and consistent ad spend, marketing teams can budget for long-term campaigns as well as ad hoc, shorter ones.
This is important, because studies show that businesses with long-term strategies had 47% more top-line growth than those who didn’t, and 36% higher earnings, too.
Brands who have successfully steered through recessions in the past include Amazon, who doubled-down on their ad spend and saw a resulting sales growth of 28% in 2009. By continually marketing throughout the period, they became industry-leaders in the eBook market, with customers purchasing more digital copies than physical for the first time that Christmas.
It’s a position they’ve been able to maintain ever since – largely because they invested while competition was low.
3. It drives long-term profit growth
Previous recessions have proven the significant benefits of continued brand building even in difficult financial times.
Creative output has been found by some studies to have had five times as much impact on profit as budget allocation did during the last recession. That means that, while budgeting conversations are happening, it’s key to not lose sight of the potential benefits marketing activity can have on your long-term profit.
Spending on marketing efforts now, in the present moment, will often mean more profit and growth in the future.
How to increase sales during a recession: 5 principles to follow
A cost-effective marketing plan should always include a focus on social media. It’s the driving force behind 71% of consumers deciding to purchase something, and more than half (57%) of the world’s population is active on at least one social media site, so there’s no shortage of potential customers.
These five principles will help to develop a strategy that boosts brand sales, while keeping sentiment high and costs low:
1. Don’t go dark
The stronger your brand, the more resilient it is to price elasticity. This will be vital as inflation grows, and brands must work to justify their pricing.
It’s widely established that this resilience – and the associated ability to bounce-back after the economic downturn – is why protecting share of voice (SoV) is so key to successful recession marketing.
The Harvard Business Review noted how, in past downturns, it was the consumer goods companies who were able to increase their SoV by increasing or maintaining their advertising spend who were able to capture market share from their rivals.
The report states how, “on average, increases in marketing spending during a recession have boosted financial performance throughout the year following the recession.”
The role of influencers
Whether you use them to communicate with existing customers or to attract new ones, influencers are guardians of their little corners of the internet. They know how to keep a core audience engaged, how to establish themselves as trusted voices within a niche, and how to create a variety of content to engage with specific target audiences.
All of these skills are directly transferable when approaching a marketing campaign – and using an influencer’s social media expertise in your recession marketing strategy will enable you to establish your brand’s SoV, and protect your resilience.
2. Push focus onto digital marketing
A multi-channel approach to recession marketing leads to a higher long-term return on investment.
Market research shows that audiences’ favourite type of branded content to see is video. It’s a potent marketing tool, and it tends to provide more of a long-term impact – driving brand messaging amongst online audiences.
As consumers turn to social media communities for support during the recession, it’s the best place to reach them – and by diversifying your marketing funnel with a larger outreach on digital platforms, you’ll succeed at layering your brand messaging: which itself is understood to show a 40% improvement in business impact.
The role of influencers
As social media experts, influencers are creative experts in designing digital campaigns that really hit the brief.
More than half of marketers believe that influencer marketing helps with quality customer acquisition. Work with the right influencer, and they’ll not only prove to be a low-cost recession marketing asset – they’ll also give your brand a boost in terms of reliability, aligning you with their targeted and trustworthy content – vital in these uncertain times.
3. Highlight efficiencies and value
During a recession, marketing initiatives have to keep efficiency in mind.
That’s efficiency in two senses: emphasising how you can help deliver it to your consumer base, and ensuring that marketing strategies are as efficient as possible internally.
As consumer spending drops, brands should highlight the benefit of their products above and beyond their price. Avoid heavily relying on price-based communications and instead emphasise the effectiveness of your products or services.
Are they time-saving? Convenient? Customers will be focused on efficiencies as they try to cut back on frivolous spending.
As for marketing efficiencies, a strong strategy will help to maximise ROI. It’s worth spending time perfecting brand SEO. With real-time SEO optimisation, brands have the chance to continually tailor their online communications to better fall in-line with the latest customer needs, ensuring that they stay relevant.
It’s just as important to consider the SEO of your social media profiles as it is your other digital channels – especially as research shows that TikTok is being used as a search engine more often than Google by many young consumers – read more in our guide to TikTok SEO.
The role of influencers
Influencers are able to deliver efficiencies within a marketing strategy on several fronts.
Firstly, consider ways to leverage influencers of different sizes to maximise the effectiveness of your campaigns. Given that word-of-mouth marketing is so highly-effective, many brands are now considering higher use of UGC creators (read our guide to using UGC creators) to help create a buzz around their campaigns.
Secondly, for relatively low advertising spend, micro-influencers offer a higher return on engagement than their larger influencer counterparts – up to 60% higher – so for brands with a niche target audience, there’s an opportunity to use low-cost influencers to deliver a higher ROI.
Plus, as with any influencer campaign, brands can use repurposed creator content to reduce their own creative investment costs – or work with influencers to ensure that their content output stays relevant, staying reactive to real-time trends.
4. Be honest and direct
It may be that the way to give the best customer experience during the recession is not to focus on your usual marketing strategies – not to push new products, deals, or hand out freebies to influencers – but rather to just be honest.
As well as monitoring customer spending habits, brands would find it useful to also monitor their concerns. There has, recently, been a peak in searches for ‘why is inflation so high’? and ‘when will prices go down?’. Customers are looking for answers amidst the economic crisis, and in order to gain their trust, brands should try to provide information to help them – not platitudes that may simply seem inauthentic.
Bear in mind that consumers will want different things from brands. 56%, for example, want brands to ‘inspire ideas’, while 79% have stated they want brands to help them ‘save money’.
Creating a tailored, honest, and direct strategy will go some way to establishing trust with consumers – increasing brand sentiment and helping to keep you front-of-mind throughout the crisis.
The role of influencers
Big brands should take inspiration from smaller influencer businesses on TikTok, who have been rallying beneath the #pricetransparency hashtag to explain the hidden costs and expenditures behind their products and services, as well as calculating the cost of their overall business cycles. The hashtag is incredibly popular, already picking up over 5.3M views.
This kind of brutally honest update has the effect of satiating consumer curiosity, assuring them that a brand is honest, and developing a sense of community as users feel they’re ‘all in it together’.
It also encourages users to support the brands in question to reward them for their authenticity, and because they do not fear being ‘taken advantage of’ in the same way brands risk otherwise when raising prices during an economic downturn.
5. Look to the data to capture demand
Knowing exactly what your customer base looks like will prove essential during any recession marketing comms, as the more tailored your approach, the higher the likelihood your efforts will be well received.
Increased personalisation, responsiveness and honesty will all go over well with potential customers, who will be more swayed by marketing communications which resonate with their situation.
The role of influencers
As well as providing opportunities for AB testing through smaller campaigns – with the ability to put more budget behind the content that performs better – influencers can themselves be targeted through data.
Tailoring your influencer choice by target audience, age, location, situation, interests… All of these will help you to ensure that your recession marketing spend is working harder, and going further with the right audiences. And the diversity of influencers means there’s guaranteed to be the perfect influencer for your brand campaign out there.
Marketing in a recession 2023
Unfortunately, it seems that a recession is unavoidable – which means that developing a recession marketing plan that reaches a wider audience of potential customers is vital.
As marketing budgets shrink, influencer marketing campaigns will prove to be one of the best ways to continue to build brand awareness and share of voice during the recession – and, as long as brands approach their influencer partnerships in the right way, they’ll help to protect brand sentiment, too.
It’s critical that marketing teams have the freedom to make the investment into future-proofing their brands even through tough economic times. Research is already showing that when a recession hits, consumers turn to online communities for support, and that’s where marketing spend is going to have the most impact.
Talk to us about how we can help you to develop your recession marketing plan on social media, and help to make sure that your marketing campaign hits the right note with your customer base.
Influencer marketing is effective – both in terms of cost, and results. If you’re looking to include an influencer element to your marketing campaigns in 2023, why not read on for more insights and case studies to help get it right:
