During an economic downturn, it can be easy to cut your B2B digital marketing budget completely, but this can be a big mistake. Maximising your budget can help you to keep generating revenue throughout a recession so that you come out the other side miles ahead of your competitors.
When the economy fluctuates, many businesses review what they’re spending and where across all departments. And marketing can be one of the first budgets to be cut.
However, as we’ve seen in previous recessions, businesses that focus their B2B marketing budget and put the right strategy in place to drive ROI are successful when it comes to maintaining market share when competitors cut marketing budgets completely.
While it can be tempting to completely cut your marketing budget, why not reconsider and look at where you can spend your budget more wisely to get the most from it?
Doing this will help you to steal a march on your competitors during economic uncertainty and come out the other side stronger.
Research shows that, for 75% of businesses, signals of an economic downturn in 2023 had an influence on their media budget decisions. However, during previous recessions, those brands who maintained or raised spend saw higher increases in market share when the market recovered, in comparison to those who slashed their marketing budgets.
Digital marketing is key to business growth in 2023. If you want your B2B customers to find when they’re researching potential solutions, you need to make sure you have an online presence. Statistics show that B2B buyers are 57-70% through their buying research before contacting a sales person and nine out of ten B2B buyers say that online content has a moderate to major effect on their purchasing decisions.
So, you can see how important it is to be online so that your B2B buyers can find you when they’re looking for solutions online.
In this blog, we’ll talk you through the top 7 marketing strategies you can follow to get the most from your digital marketing budget and generate revenue for your business.
If you want to maximise ROI from your digital marketing and ensure that your business weathers the economic climate, you can follow a few simple strategies. When budgets are low, it’s crucial to get as much out of your budget as possible.
Driving results with the budget you have is more effective than simply switching activities off and hoping that your customers are still going to find you somehow. No two strategies are the same, and as you develop your strategy, you’ll learn more about your customers and the activities that work for your business which means you will perfect your strategy over time.
If you want to get the most from your digital marketing budget and keep driving business growth, you need to know what your business goals are. Understanding exactly what you want to achieve with your budget will help you to understand which areas of marketing you need to invest more into and which you need to pull back on.
Having clear objectives and goals in place can help you to make sure you allocate your budget efficiently to support those goals.
If you’re already running digital marketing activities, always conduct a thorough analysis of what you’re already spending and how the activities are performing to see where you might be wasting budget on activities that aren’t delivering well enough for you. This is a great way to see where you could be boosting your budget and where you could be pulling back to make the most from your spend.
Alongside your spend, have a look at how your activities are performing. You should do this regularly anyway to make sure you’re always getting the most from your budget.
Look at data including:
This can really help you to get a good understanding of which channels and campaigns are helping you to reach your business goals and which could do with improvement or with cutting spend. Doing this will help you to put more budget into the channels that are delivering the best ROI for your business. Focusing more on the activities that drive ROI and conversions will automatically mean you’re getting the best results for your business.
Inbound marketing is a highly cost-effective way to drive leads for your business so we recommend focusing on strategies that can help you.
It allows you to target your ideal customers and the people who are most likely to buy from you. Plus, the leads generated through inbound marketing activities cost 61% less than those generated through outbound marketing strategies.
Activities such as content marketing, SEO and social media are all inbound marketing strategies that allow you to create highly targeted campaigns to make sure you’re not targeting people who are never going to buy from you. Inbound marketing can help you to increase web traffic, leads and conversion rates as well as sales and profit.
B2B marketing is all about building relationships with your target audience so you need to keep in touch with them throughout their decision making journey. The customer journey for B2B customers is longer than B2C customers so it’s important to make sure you’re providing the information they need to make the decision to use your brand at every stage of the process.
This includes using channels such as SEO, content marketing and email marketing to help build brand awareness and trust. Being responsive throughout this journey and post-purchase can help to encourage repeat customers too.
If you want to see how your business is performing or need ideas for how you can reach your target audience in more ways, have a look at what your competitors are doing. This doesn’t mean you should directly copy them - just because they’re running a campaign, it doesn’t mean it’s working for them or driving the right type of traffic.
Staying ahead of what your competitors are doing can provide you with valuable insights that you can use to improve your own campaigns. You can either change what you offer or set yourself apart from your competitors to take a bigger portion of the market share.
Always think about how you can set yourself apart from your competitors and encourage customers to buy from you rather than your competitors.
Having a thorough understanding of your customers is key to success in digital marketing. The more you know about them, the better. What are their pain points and what channels do they prefer to find information from?
Understanding this will help you to build the right content and make sure your brand appears in the right places when they’re searching online. For any marketing campaign you produce, always have your target audience in mind. Have a think about their customers too - how are they approaching their target audience and how can it help you to direct your marketing towards your own target audience.
When your budget is tight and the economy is uncertain, it can be easy to think that marketing should be cut or reduced. However, this can make it more difficult to recover when the economy sees an upturn again and you’ll be left far behind your competitors.
On the other hand, if you can keep marketing throughout the downturn, you’re likely to come out the other side stronger and miles ahead of competitors who have completely cut their marketing spend. Getting the most from the budget you have is a far better and more effective strategy and can help you to come out of the recession even stronger than before.
If you’d like to find out more about getting the most from your digital marketing budget or making sure your strategy is as effective as possible, please contact us at hello@logica-digital.co.uk
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At Logica Digital, we take the time to understand your business and customers to create a bespoke marketing plan that will deliver the best return on investment for your business. We always get results.
Call: 0114 551 1534
hello@logica-digital.co.ukWhatsApp: 07822011623
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