Video Transcript

The economy, we know, is always in flux. So how do you have a marketing strategy ready to go regardless of what’s happening? I want to talk a little bit today about how it’s important to really make sure you’re setting aside time to answer the big strategy questions, or at a minimum, asking them and then knowing how you’re going to go answer them.

I’m talking about if you see demand starting to soften, what are you going to do about that? You start to see your brand sentiment start to decline, what are you going to do about that?

So, let’s use a quick example. You as a marketer, you’re looking at your metrics every single month. You start to see that while your site visits are staying strong, you’re starting to see your lead volume start to decline. It could be a number of things. It could be a conversion problem, could be wrong audience coming after you, or it could be that the market starting to soften.

You may go talk to sales, sales says, “Hey, our sales are strong. You don’t need to worry about anything. You don’t need to worry about anything.” As a marketer inside, you get that little nagging voice. It’s like, I need to worry about something. This is the perfect opportunity for what we do for clients all the time. We would call this a back pocket strategy. This is where we’re going to go ahead and put a plan together that’s ready to roll off the shelf. But that means you have a lot of things already known or prepped ahead of time.

It means you know how long it’s going to take to get a campaign live. It means you know that once a campaign is live, how long it’s going to take to actually be impactful in the market and impact your metrics. And all of those things are things that you need to start thinking about and creating strategies for now. Now, whether you call it a strategy or a playbook, tom-ay-to tom-ah-to. But what’s important is that you’re writing down and coming up with that big strategic question list of: What are the things I need to care about? What are the market factors I need to care about What are the business factors I need to care about?

Whether it’s, what’s our production like, or what are our people like for our service offerings, and what do we see happening in the environment and do we think a recession is going to come? And then you need to put those playbooks together. You can do that in a number of ways because you might say, “How am I supposed to do that when I don’t have time?” Well, you can look at, do you need to supplement your internal staff and take on a more long-term investment?

Or do you want to look at outside thinking because you don’t have the skill set in-house? That might be an agency partner or maybe some other means or consultant or whatever that might look like. All that to say, it’s important that you make sure you’re paying attention to the playbooks that you have in existence and the ones that you need to create to supplement your marketing strategy to really mitigate the risk that comes from economic volatility.

So, I hope this is helpful. And if you have more questions, feel free to reach out.