Elliot Schimel is the CEO of Mission Control Marketing, a strategic marketing agency that delivers business solutions for B2B companies.
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We’re facing a challenging economic climate. Rising interest rates, inflation and fear of an impending recession are top of mind for business leaders at small and midsized companies as speculation continues about how long this downturn will last. As a result, many B2B organizations have an understandable hesitancy about spending right now.
However, it is possible to grow revenue during times of economic uncertainty if you focus strategically on certain areas. Within marketing, this means streamlining your sales funnel for optimal efficiency and promoting products and services with the shortest sales cycles. It also means prioritizing marketing channels that meet three important criteria:
1. They are proven to be cost-effective.
2. They complement each other.
3. They drive the buying process.
Is it time for your organization to pivot to a marketing campaign that can cost-effectively drive sales? Here are three channels that may offer the best ROI this year.
Email Marketing
There’s a decade-old sales adage that it is five to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. And while marketing strategies like account-based marketing and the advanced use of analytics have perhaps closed this gap by helping us provide a more relevant, personalized experience to all customers, there is something to be said for mining the assets you already have before investing in something new.
Email marketing is cost-effective because you don’t need to buy any new contacts, and you’ve likely already cultivated an audience among existing subscribers who know your brand and selling points. This year, use email to focus prospects on specific products and solutions that fit their immediate needs. You can gain this insight by building specific buyer profiles and mapping customer journeys. The time you spend mining existing prospects will be well worth it when targeted email outreach leads to sales. To accomplish this, make sure you also have landing pages that can lead to purchases linked within your campaigns.
Search And Digital Ads
Search and digital advertisements typically attract prospects who are entering the buying process. They have a need and they’re actively looking for a solution. Because these prospects are already in the buying mindset, the sales cycle is likely to be shorter. Again, make sure that when these potential buyers click through, you have landing pages built out with the right information and call to action, whether you’re prompting them to make a purchase or pushing them further down the funnel by inviting them to subscribe to your emails.
Online advertising may be particularly cost-effective this year as other brands pull back on their ad spend, leaving more ad inventory available at a potentially lower cost.
Public Relations
With PR being earned media, it is usually more cost-effective than other paid marketing channels, with the added benefit of third-party recognition and validation for your brand. However, in today’s chaotic media landscape, it’s important to reach your target audience through strategic placements in the outlets they trust and make sure that potential buyers see the story. In other words, a million media placements do nothing to drive sales if they aren’t reaching the right people.
This speaks to understanding your buyers as well as to how you should integrate PR into other aspects of your marketing campaigns. Not only can PR be a cost-effective channel during challenging economic conditions, but it can also be leveraged across other marketing channels. Using earned media placements in your email marketing campaigns, for example, can ensure that prospects are seeing them, amplifying an article’s value well beyond its time of publication.
Marketing often provides critical ancillary support across an organization. While pulling out all the bells and whistles this year may not be possible, I don’t think companies should cut marketing to bare bones either. There is one certainty during an economic downturn, and it’s that an upswing will eventually come. Don’t get caught flat-footed and unable to take advantage of growth opportunities when the economy begins to accelerate again because you have to rebuild your marketing engine from the ground up. Instead, go back to basics and invest strategically in campaigns that leverage the cost-effective channels discussed here to drive revenue.
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