It seems obvious that an economic downturn is coming. How does this affect on Marketing strategies, and what can those marketing teams do to minimize the damages of an economic downturn?
In this article we would explain how through the correct use of Customer Data you could optimize your resources in order to minimize damages of an economic downturn.
Current Situation
After the global pandemic, the war and at the high inflation rates that western countries are facing, it seems quite obvious that we are facing an economic contraction. We are quite experienced with this type of situation after 2008, but our current possibilities to face it are different from those we had in 2008.
Today, we have new solutions that could help our company be one of those companies that suffer the least out of the recession. The adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data helps every department of companies to develop data-driven strategies, really useful especially in time where your company would need to gain efficiency against your competitors. The problem comes for those companies that aren’t yet implementing this type of solutions, as their techniques are becoming obsoletes.
In this article we will focus on the main problems and possible solutions that a Marketing team could be facing in this situation.
How does an economic downturn affect marketing teams?
Budget Cuts
When economic contractions start, companies tend to lower down each department’s budget, but as seen always, marketing budget tends to be the most affected one. When the marketing budget is noticeably cut your strategies would surely suffer, and what is more important, your customers tend to realize this, which would end resulting on loosing customers.
Lack of purchasing power from customers
Economic recessions affect on every single member of the society and your customers would not escape from it. Your customers won’t be able to continue spending as before and they would start choosing more wisely where to spend their money. Competence would start becoming more fierce as the demand would decrease, so your ability to overcome your competitors must be better than ever.
Higher prices for resources
Inflation, and specially in the current situation, raises up the prices paid by your company to produce goods or services. So margins become much smaller, and marketing gets much more complicated, offers and discounts need to be measured to the nearest, and prices can’t raise up for a weaker experience as customers would notice and leave your company for your competitors.
Loosing Customers
It’s the moment where you lose customers and it’s 7 times more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain one. As we have seen in the points described before, loosing customers is a typical thing in economic downturns, this can suppose a complete breakdown to a company as loosing customers is the most expensive matter for a company.
The need for companies to retain customers and gain unhappy customers from their competitors goes through boosting your marketing efficiency, and your customer experience, in order to lead the market in an uncertain moment.
How can marketing teams face economic downturns?
Know where to cut off by knowing your customers
Cuts in budget are going to happen, the crucial point resides in knowing where to make those cuts so that customers don’t realize it. With the use of an Intelligent CDP you would be able to track your customers journey to know where and what they expect from your company. With this analysis done you would be able to cut off just the thing you where doing and that affected the least to your customers.
Stock management with demand forecast to optimize resources
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence bring unlimited opportunities for companies. Your company could start to know and understand your customer to the extent of being able to forecast your customer’s next movement. In this way with the historical data and Machine Learning, you would be able to have predictions of demand up to a 95% or above preciseness on the demand of each product, and each customer.
With this detail of forecast you would be able to reduce to minimums losses or surpluses of stock, saving huge amounts of money for the company.
Offers and discounts depending on each individual situation
Attitudinal segmentation, know which customers are looking for offers and which ones are not in order to prioritize discounts and maintain those customers. By tracking your customers attitudinal and behavioral contacts with your company, you would be able to know if they are looking for discounts or not, in this way you would optimize your marketing strategies, and use your budget more wisely.
WHY FLYDE?
Do you want your company to move on to the next level? A CDP is the key tool that will allow you to maximise the potential of your data and grow your business. Working like the big multinationals in the market, which already have this type of software, and having control over all your data is now very simple.
Moreover, if you do not have IT or Data Scientist teams, this tool will allow you to outsource this function. And if you have them but want to reduce their workload and give more autonomy to your marketing and business teams when it comes to working with data, implementing an easy-to-use CDP would be the best option for your company. It will allow any single member of your company to use it, as this softwares are prepared for them.
Start taking control of your data today.
Schedule a meeting with one of our experts and discover how FLYDE can help your company achieve its goals.
