Recession is around the corner
How to understand economic headwinds and their impact on customer behavior, become an agile marketing organization, minimize the impact of marketing budget cuts, and optimize marketing investments to deliver results today without compromising on tomorrow's growth are some of the top questions we are tackling with our clients.
IT services and Consulting with revenues <50 M USD forms the majority of our clientele.
"Doing more with less, quickly and efficiently" is always on the minds of B2B marketers and/or Founding and executive management teams
Here are some considerations:
1. Do not stretch yourselves on marketing all service lines and all verticals. Play to your strengths, Prioritize focus areas based on strengths, potential deal sizes, past conversion ratios, and sales cycles. Realigning and being laser focussed helps in channelizing the efforts and optimizing the budgets.
2. Challenge current processes (solutioning, customer data management, assets creation, demand generation, etc.,), to make them faster, simpler, and more agile for the long term: Brings efficiencies in execution and addresses any possible fallouts
3. Rethink the way your company leverages human resources (Part vs full-time, in-house vs outsource, Low-cost Locations to outsource).
4. Streamline Customer Data management processes and tools. Close the gap between data and action.
5. Double down and deep dive into gaining "Market, Customer Insights".
6. Be Laser focussed on creating contextual content based on the insights gathered. Leverage and curate the content from OEMs that fit into your customer context.
7. Identify and hold big tickets, low outcome yielding, high channel cost items (Ex: Physical events, paid media). Consider low-cost practices and effective channels Ex: Drip Campaigns that are insight-driven, well-segmented, and personalized campaigns augmented with low-cost SDRs (considering SDRs are fed with high intent leads and not the regular MQLs.
8. Incrementally increase the investments in digital channels with defined outcomes (ex: Social Media for top-of-the-funnel reach/brand awareness, getting found, etc.,) to build the brand and reputation to augment the long-term growth.
"If you do not have the right insights, you fail. If you ‘get’ the insight right, you thrive".
Insights are the bedrock of every marketing strategy and tactical execution - Internalize it
