During recession keep spending on marketing if you can

Spending on marketing

If you can continue your marketing efforts during this recession as others are cutting back, your company will come out stronger and bigger than before.
That is easier said than done as there are at least 3 problems with this:
1) Cash: Enough cash to start with or sustaining your cash flow throughout the recession.
2) Spending inefficiently on marketing, you are wasting good money required to survive.
3) The size of budget for marketing as you don’t know how many years this recession will last.

How do you know upfront if you are spending wisely on marketing?
If we all could predict the outcome, then every company would be doing the same efforts and spend efficiently on marketing.

Marketing

On the subject of marketing there are the metrics of the past of each effort like advertising, mailing campaigns, billboards or events that should allow to measure the efficiency of each of them.
One could expect those investments in marketing that have worked and have resulted into leads and sales should still bring better results than those that didn’t generate any leads or sales.

However as recession influences your potential customers too, successful events like trade shows can turn out to become an overnight failure, as the recession will push companies to limit their spending on travel and lodging.

Online events or website: gaining importance
Any possibility for free or at a low cost for participating in events or acquiring information are likely to become more popular and more successful.
Thus online events or Internet search is likely to become more important as these will give access to or bring information to the employees, decision makers and influencers at a low cost.

Your company website, webinars, online presentations, online articles, white paper syndication are all likely to benefit from a higher rate of interest or participation.

These media have problems too:
- Broadcasting the existence of your information: SEO, links, creating awareness, branding
- Identifying the people or companies visiting your website, reading online articles, downloading white papers or participating in webinars. You need to know who.

For both type of problems solutions exist:
- Using the Internet as a communication channel (including email).
- Website visitor identification: know who is visiting or participating online.

Leads generated is the metric for marketing
The number of leads generated by each type of marketing effort, is key to continue the marketing spending by type for successful business.
Continue or increase those marketing efforts that actually bring leads, preferably quality leads.

Recession duration making impossible to budget marketing

The big unknown will be the duration of the recession that can span over several years, which makes calculating a budget for marketing over the entire recession probably impossible.

You know when the recession started, but you won’t know upfront how long it will last.

- Spend wisely and evaluate the leads generated by each marketing effort.
- Expect a change in marketing channels to more online.