As you already know, the US is currently going through a housing crisis. You must also remember that this comes right after the immense workers’ protests due to the major layoffs during COVID-19. In this current condition, the last thing people want is to be bombarded with overblown ads on their TV.
This doesn’t mean that you should shift your overblown ads to the digital platform either. What you should ideally do during a recession is to renew your understanding of your consumer base and the market.
Is your product an essential purchase like groceries or basic toiletries? Then people are going to buy them anyway. You don’t need to change your marketing strategies for that. But according to a top Dallas digital marketing agency, there are three other categories of products:
Treats
These are the products that aren’t essential, but you can still find a good justification to purchase them during a recession. This might mean a shampoo that is slightly fancier than the one you use now or even a tub of ice cream to brighten your mood.
Postponeables are goods that you can postpone buying. You might have wanted to buy a certain lipstick now, but you can postpone it for a later time. These are the items that people keep adding to the cart for future purchases.
Expendables
Expendables are products that you can not justify buying. This includes everything from expensive cars to weekend stays in Napa Valley.
Of course, what should and should not be included in each of these categories is highly subjective. But, as any good digital marketing agency in Dallas would suggest, you can still find a predominant pattern if you conduct market surveys.
If you sell products that are treats, postponeables, or expendables- this article is for you. Keep reading to find how to up your digital marketing game during the recession without being tone-deaf.
Start Market Research Again
Yes, you must have conducted thorough market research when you initially launched your business. But that’s no longer enough. Just like peacetime conditions can no longer be considered during wartime conditions, we can no longer keep using the pre-COVID market condition as the standard. Any reputable digital marketing company in Dallas will advise you to redo your market research.
During this market research, you specifically have to focus on finding out the recession psychology of your customers.
Are you wondering what this means? Customers, during the recession, fall under any of these four categories.
Live-For-Today Customers
These are the customers who start buying more during any financial crisis because they treat it like it’s their last hurrah.
Comfortable Well-Off Customers
These customers’ spending habits don’t change significantly during a recession. They don’t start splurging on items like the first category of customers, but neither do they start saving up.
Pained But Patient Customers
These are the customers who become super wary of their spending. They exercise supreme caution while buying things.
Slam On The Brakes Customers
These are the most paranoid customers. They deal with the recession by completely slamming the brakes on their spending. Until the financial situation improves, you cannot make them pay for non-essentials.
Experienced professionals at Dallas digital marketing agency prefer conducting a market survey to be aware of which category or categories the customer base predominantly belongs to.
Focus on Retaining Customers
Don’t try to build a whole new audience base during the recession. Sure, it is tempting to hyperfocus on the first stage of the sales funnel, but there’s something that you need to understand. Attracting new customers is necessary, but it is also extremely costly, and this process doesn’t have a high ROI.
Does that mean you should stop marketing completely? Not at all! According to a top Dallas digital marketing company, you need to focus on more sustainable marketing avenues like email marketing and content marketing.
However, what you should be hyper-focusing on is retaining your existing customers. These are the people who probably already consider your product an essential or at least a treat. You don’t need to spend a lot to convince them to buy your goods again.
Change Strategies
Think about how most of the food delivery services changed their strategies during the pandemic. Instead of delivering restaurant-quality meals, they started focusing on food that felt home-cooked. This was specifically meant for the patients who were down with COVID-19, and were, thus, isolated.
These food delivery companies saw the most pressing need of the times and changed their business strategy accordingly. This is something that you might consider doing if you can help people in these trying times. You might have to think of a different angle from which your products can be needed by people.
Focus on Content Marketing
As mentioned before, focus on sustainable and relatively inexpensive modes of marketing during a recession. Content marketing is not very difficult. The digital marketing agency in Dallas suggests that all you need to do is know which keywords are related to your business people are looking for and then use those same keywords in your content.
But you should always remember that your content should answer some pressing questions that the people have. Simply utilizing the keyword for marketing purposes without providing relevant or quality content is going to get you blacklisted by Google.
Up Your SEO Game
Unless your business shows up at the top of the first page of Google when a customer searches for related items, you aren’t going to make a lot of sales.
People need to know that your site exists for them to buy from you. So, the recession is a great time to work on improving your SEO game. This is a task that often gets neglected when the business is functioning in full swing. But this off-time provides a great opportunity to start working on this because improving your SEO takes time.
You cannot rush into this. But effective content marketing is one of the best ways to get relevant backlinks that raises you to the top of the search engine results page.
It’s best to take the help of the top Dallas digital marketing company or the ones around you.
Get New Qualifications/Accreditations
The recession is also a great time to get all the qualifications that you are missing out on. For example, if you have a cosmetics or skin care company, you should consider getting the “Cruelty-Free” and “Vegan” tags because nowadays, customers care about “clean products.”
This is an ideal period to reassess and reexamine your products to do quality control.
Hire Freelancers
Thousands lost their jobs during the pandemic. As harsh as it seemed, it was a necessary process for some businesses which really couldn’t afford to keep paying their full-time employees. However, when the pandemic was brought under control, many workers refused to return to the same working conditions. This caused a major labor shortage in all the industries across the US.
One of the most effective ways to deal with this labor shortage is by hiring freelancers who can work from home. Since content marketing and SEO are what you’re focusing on right now, hiring an SEO expert on a part-time basis is a great idea.
Improve Your Website
The websites of most businesses tend to get ignored because a lot of your goods are sold on mass commercial platforms, like Amazon. However, having a professional home site is necessary.
It’s understandable if you don’t usually get time to work on your website. But during this off-time, you might consider using heatmaps to analyze your site statistics. This is the only way you can understand how your customers are interacting with your website.
Don’t Make Radical Changes
Do not take a sharp 180-degree turn. You cannot suddenly change your entire business model to convince your customers that you are providing essentials during a pandemic.
In the example of the food delivery services changing strategies (from restaurant-quality food to home-cooked food for patients), they still kept on delivering food. This is the important part.
If you quintessentially change the core of your business during a time of crisis, people are simply not going to trust you anymore. Nor are they going to show any interest in your new products.
Focus on Social Media to Engage with Customers
People spent a lot of time on social media during the pandemic. Even without the pandemic, all marketing agents know that social media marketing is the new kid in town. Unless you are well-versed in social media marketing, you are going to lose out on a lot of customers.
But the thing about social media is that you cannot directly start selling stuff. You need some time to build a certain degree of engagement. Why not utilize the recession to build up that engagement?
It is best to get in touch with the industry experts at the digital marketing company in Dallas who will guide you through the entire process of increasing your engagement and building a long-lasting relationship with your customers online.
Hope these digital marketing tricks help you to deal with any obstacle that comes your way during a recession!
