How to Market Through Uncertain Times

Being in business is challenging at the best of times. Yet doing business has felt like a bit of a rollercoaster for a lot of us over the past decade or so.

What with matters like Brexit, Trump, Covid, Truss, Trump again, as well as upheaval of all kinds both domestically and globally, it’s been a bewildering journey; economically, politically, legislatively, emotionally. And that’s putting it ridiculously lightly.

But away from public current affairs, businesses aren’t immune to suffering their own internal turmoil. Maybe they’re just struggling through a bit of a lean time – that happens in business. Or maybe an external factor has come out of nowhere and hit them hard.

In either case, the worry and uncertainty of the situation often drives organisations to cut down, and the marketing budget rarely comes away unscathed.

I don’t judge – sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Yet marketing is an essential business function. As a marketing consultant and a business owner myself, I felt compelled to write about how best to approach marketing during uncertain times.

Here are 5 crucial tips to keeping a strong promotional presence in spite of bewildering upheaval.

Keep Comms Clear

When uncertainty surrounds us, we naturally go on the lookout for clarity, certainty, and safety. After all, uncertainty is proven to be more stressful than the certainty of bad news.

Looking back to major events in the past decade such as Brexit and Covid, everything felt a bit brain-fryingly precarious. Social media was aflame. There was so much conflicting information out there that people just felt swamped.

And looking to current news coverage of ongoing wars and international incidents, the internet and the news media still feels like a melting pot of conflicting emotions; where information, misinformation, and propaganda parading as either can fly around the world at the speed of an algorithm.

It’s all a recipe for worry, despondency, and ultimate confusion. But what can small businesses like us learn from this?

Well, if your audience is seeking certainty about something that concerns them – and you can give it – then do so. Regardless of whether the uncertainty in play is widespread or localised, internal or external, aim for lean clarity in all your comms – especially your marketing.

Clearly state the benefits of your offer, don’t bloat your copy with unnecessary fluff, and don’t leave readers to work things out for themselves. This is especially important when the public or your audience are going through some kind of hardship.

After all, instability creates worry, and worry takes up valuable mental bandwidth. When your audience are struggling, your marketing needs to focus being easy to understand and even easier to act on.

If you’re in the tricky situation of having to communicate the fallout of a current, ongoing, unstable situation, then focus on what you do know, and communicate clearly what you don’t know just yet. If you can let people know when you expect to see more clarity, then say so.

Here are three copywriting essentials that are absolutely crucial for comms during hard times:

Help your reader immediately qualify whether your offer is a good fit for them. Don’t string them along – are you a good match or not? Would they be better off trying elsewhere?
Use persuasive, clear language that’s simple to understand. Even if you’re writing B2B comms, write in a way that the average person in their mid-teens could easily understand.
Always end on a single, crystal-clear CTA (call-to-action) that plainly states what the reader needs to do next. Don’t leave next steps down to assumptions or guesswork.

Maintain Brand Consistency

Sometimes, organisations feel that new, challenging times call for new, challenging branding. Yet during turbulent times, embarking on a rebrand can be incredibly risky.

Changing a recognised, established brand identity can be a significant gamble, even during times of plenty. Deciding to do so during times of potential hardship may damage your brand’s recognisability when you need it most.

But this goes a little deeper than mere recognisability. Rebranding is an expense, both in terms of money and of time. This work can end up taking resources away from more direct revenue-generating tasks you could be focusing on in the here and now.

If you are itching to do some brand work, focus on building upon your brand’s established awareness and equity rather than scrapping a brand persona that you’ve operated under for years. You can always give your brand a significant facelift once things stabilise.

However, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t try new things at all during turbulent times. Modern marketing is all about experimentation and learning from those experiments. If you are dealing with widespread economic impacts, it’s likely that your audience is feeling it too – and as such their behaviour will likely change. So, keep a close eye on behavioural and engagement analytics – are older tactics still working? Or is there scope to cautiously experiment with an updated approach?

There are a few extreme exceptions to this rule, of course. If you’re battling a PR disaster that has irreparably damaged your brand, you might want to make significant changes – regardless of what the economy is doing. You’d also be forgiven for making significant changes to your promotional presence to comply with unavoidable regulatory, legislative, and algorithmic developments.

All in all, don’t take unnecessary risks, especially during difficult times. Keep on keeping on with what’s working well; and maintain a strong and unwavering front in the face of adversity.

Focus on Customer Retention

Maintaining good relations with existing customers becomes especially important during times of economic hardship. Keeping existing customers on-side obviously provides much-needed revenue stability and predictability at times when those things are in short supply. After all, many of us have heard how acquiring a new B2B customer can cost 5 to 7 times more than retaining an old one!

Plus, when customer relationships are fostered through trust, proven value delivery, and general bonhomie, that makes it much harder for competitors to poach those clients from you – even if those competitors are resorting to aggressive price slashes and other desperate tactics to shore up fresh business.

So how can you keep existing customers on-side during hard times? Let’s explore a few ideas.

One way is to develop value-driven content campaigns exclusively for existing clients. What this looks like will likely be dictated by your own capacity for content creation and the sorts of relationships you have with your clients; but could include exclusive educational blogs, community-building webinars, and industry research to name just a few. This will help paint you as a valuable partner who can help them through their own difficulties, rather than just a passive, transactional service provider.

Another idea is to amplify customer success stories, both by promoting existing ones and by collecting fresh new case studies, testimonials, and ROI data. This can help you reinforce your value to existing clients whilst also potentially bringing new, similar prospects to your door.

You could even create a group of VIP clients, made up of your longest standing and/or highest lifetime-value customers. These organisations could be targeted with personalised marketing efforts that showcase new offerings, industry-specific solutions, or even suggest tailored partnership opportunities.

Maximise Cost-Free Marketing Fundamentals

Marketing can seem like a costly old game on the surface. But when you get down to it, a lot of the really valuable marketing stuff is free. So, take the time to cautiously review your marketing fundamentals.

In times of sudden hardship, the first thing to “sense check” is your marketing strategy. How do these new conditions affect the assumptions, research, and overall approach defined by your strategy?

The goals set in your strategy might need to be adjusted in line with your current conditions. After all, it may not make sense to aim for the same goals as you did in times of plenty. Reevaluate what you are trying to accomplish in terms of marketing and sales, and don’t be afraid to dial down a few of your targets.

After all, good goals are SMART – and the “A” and “R” stand for “Achievable” and “Relevant”. When your situation changes, goals might also need change to reflect your new reality.

Secondly, double down on data. Ensure that all of your sales and marketing analytics channels are working properly and collecting the data you need them to. Take stock of all of the data at your disposal – are there any opportunities to cross-reference inter-departmental data to better understand a problem?

And once you have access to that data, collate it into formats that provide quick, actionable insight. During fallow times, it’s especially important to use data well in order to drive meaningful, data-led business and marketing decisions.

Lastly, revisit all of your “owned” marketing channels like your website, your content, your social media presence, and your email marketing – especially with performance data in mind. Here are a few pointers that may be useful:

Are there any pages on your website (aside from your home page) that currently attract a lot of traffic, only for the majority of visitors to leave without exploring the site further? How could you tweak those pages to keep people “on the hook” and moving towards a sales journey?
What content is currently performing best for you at the moment? How are people finding it and engaging with it? Could this content be tweaked to send more visitors towards a sales path? Does it need updating to add more value?
Over which channels are people finding your best-performing content or webpages (e.g., search, social, etc.)? How can you maximise the success that you’re seeing over those channels?
Have the ways people engage with your brand changed since the onset of your current economic circumstances? What lessons could be learned from that?
Does your data hint at places where your marketing may need tweaking, for example if your email marketing efforts attract good open rates but suffer poor click-through rates?
Revisit your search keywords – are you still ranking well for relevant key terms? Or have things got a bit more competitive since you last checked in?

Don’t Annihilate Your Marketing Budget!

When companies need to tighten their belts, marketing functions generally don’t end up particularly well-off. Personally, I find it troubling when companies completely withdraw their marketing budget at the first sign of economic turbulence.

Yes, there are some free things that marketers can do, and freeing up budgets looks nice on a forecast spreadsheet, but eliminating your marketing budget entirely is probably a bad idea considering your immediately present challenges.

Firstly, marketing and sales are two ends of the same process. Salespeople can’t work as effectively without warm, curious leads, generated through good marketing. Removing marketing from the equation makes the sales department’s job harder and can result in fewer closed deals. Exactly the opposite of what you want right now.

A former mentor of mine said it best: “marketing is the fuel to the sales department’s fire”. Your sales operations simply can’t maintain a steady flow of paying customers unless marketing keeps reeling in fresh leads.

Rather than zeroing-out your marketing budget, take an even, measured approach when you reevaluate your business’s costs. Explore how all of your business expenses come together to form your entire money-making picture. Chances are at least some of your marketing functions are more indispensable than you might think.

In Conclusion

A consistent and clear marketing message is always important, but in times of hardship it’s downright essential. Sadly, all too many companies panic in times of uncertainty – making vast changes to their brand presentation, forgetting promotional fundamentals, and hacking away at their marketing spend.

However, when you resist these common knee-jerk reactions, you give your brand the best chance of standing tall within your market – asserting yourself as a strong, dependable contender during tough times. When those around you fall afoul of the above missteps, a consistent, resolute approach is what will set you apart.

Need Marketing Help?

If your organisation is navigating choppy waters and you need help focusing on marketing strategy, you’re after some fresh promotional copy, or you want to harness the potential of content marketing, let’s chat. Let me know you’re interested here.