When a recession hits and company purse strings tighten, what budget lines are the first to suffer? Too often, the answer revolves around marketing. Especially if marketing is still treated as a cost center instead of a profit center, it’s tempting to de-prioritize it. But is this the best approach to marketing during a recession?

As we’ve discussed in a previous post, an economic downturn is a valid cause to increase your marketing efforts:

• 60% of brands that increased their marketing spend during the 2008 recession saw increased ROI.
• The average sales increase of marketers who spent more on their paid media was around 17%.
• Marketers who cut spending instead of increasing their promotional investments lost an average of 15% in sales.
• According to Nielsen, brands that go off-air lose about 2% of long-term revenue each quarter. When they resume their efforts, they’ll need up to five more years to recover their losses.

In addition, lower spending on conversational channels will decrease the customer experience for anyone who has a question or concern.

Spending more when others spend less doesn’t just take advantage of reduced competition. This approach to marketing during a recession allows you to focus on more long-term goals, like scaling up technology that can have a positive impact and ROI long after the recession.

Of course, it has to be done right. Simply pushing more money into ineffective channels or campaigns won’t make those campaigns more effective by default. Instead, marketers bold enough to increase spending in a recession tend to see positive impacts when they focus on strategies like these five tips to weather the storm.

1. Maximize Your Focus on ROI

In a time when budgets are tight, the fight to prove a positive return on investment is constant. Justifying your marketing investments with the positive impact they have on the organization is a vital piece of the puzzle when looking to weather the recession storm.

That begins with leveraging data and analytics to better understand customer behaviors and preferences. This “marketing during a recession” strategy allows you to tailor your efforts more closely to their needs. Additionally, you can use that same data to understand which of your marketing efforts are most successful in bringing in customers and revenue.

But the other side of the ROI equation matters, as well. A stronger focus on cost-effective marketing strategies like pay-per-click displays and social media ads can help you reach your audience at a lower cost than traditional media. When marketing decisions are driven by ROI, and that ROI can be clearly proven, it becomes much easier to maintain and even increase your investment in promotional strategies.

2. Streamline Your Marketing Efforts During a Recession

In addition to an increased ROI focus, streamlining your marketing during a recession can also go a long way toward weathering the storm.

Review your marketing goals, from brand awareness to increasing brand loyalty. Ensure that every channel, campaign, and investment adheres to those goals. In addition, it pays to run a comprehensive marketing audit that helps you better understand how different channels work together. For example, your organic social media efforts may not bring in sufficient leads on their own. However, they could be a crucial traffic driver to your website as the main lead generator.

An audit also streamlines your efforts by helping you understand how to better combine, adjust, or even remove different efforts. What was once accomplished by manual work, for example, may be automated through the right technology. This brings us to the third tip for marketing during a recession.

3. Invest in Technology Like AI or Digital Assistants

If the goal of marketing during an economic downturn or recession is to build long-term improvements and value, technology has to be a core priority. That’s why marketing technology investments are among the most common spending recommendations by experts when the markets turn sour.

Especially, AI-driven technology can have a major impact on your long-term marketing success. Machine learning enables the platform to learn on its own, providing improvements over time without extensive manual efforts.

Take AI-enabled digital assistants as an example. Implementing the right assistant means providing relevant answers to customers on their time, building a 24/7 conversational marketing opportunity. The machine learning technology embedded in the assistant, meanwhile, helps the platform to improve based on previous questions and answers to continue boosting your customer experience.

4. Focus on Tangible Value Propositions

When a recession hits, customer priorities change. Value and affordability become bigger factors, and the question of “do I really need this?” becomes ubiquitous.

Your marketing messaging needs to answer that exact question. Even as your customers question what they can and should buy with their limited funds, a strong messaging strategy continues to make the case that your brand is still the right choice.

What that messaging looks like, of course, depends on your industry and audience. But generally speaking, a focus on tangible benefits to your customers and a direct call-out to the affordability of your products (even compared to your competition) can help. The more “real” your messaging becomes, and the more you can back it up with evidence, the better.

5. Prioritize Your Brand Loyalty

Finally, a potential struggle to gain new customers during a recession means your current customers become even more important than they might have been otherwise. After all, even a 5% increase in retention can increase your revenue by 25% to 95%.

In other words, it’s time to shift focus to your current customers. How can you continue to market to them for repeat purchases or continued subscriptions?

The answer will largely lie in their experience with your brand presence. A customer journey map can be just as beneficial for current customers as for new ones. Where you can, create a sense of community, both among your customers and with your brand. The above-mentioned digital assistants can go a long way toward achieving that goal.

Marketing During a Recession: It’s a Revenue Driver, Not a Cost

Investing in marketing during a recession may be a tough sell, but that doesn’t make it less essential. In fact, it might just be the key missing ingredient for your organization to weather the storm and come out on the other side equal or even stronger in market positioning. To get there, tools like digital assistants can play a central role, all built under a larger strategic umbrella to treat marketing as a revenue driver instead of a cost.