Marketing Through a Recession: Why Now is the Time to Build and Optimize Your Marketing Assets

Call it a recession, a downturn, or whatever you like—by any name, we are living and working in challenging economic times. But as I shared in my recent post on why marketing matters during a downturn, this is no time to shut down your marketing.

In fact, now is the perfect time to build and optimize the marketing assets you need to attract ideal buyers and keep moving them further down your revenue funnel. Let’s dive into why and how.

Why You Need Solid Marketing Assets

Without strong marketing assets, you can’t generate leads. It’s that simple. If you expect to draw the right kind of leads into your revenue funnel and nurture them along their buying journey—until they become closed deals—you need good, solid marketing assets.

What exactly are those assets? They’re all the resources you use in the B2B marketing process. Think: website, blogs, guides, white papers, case studies, videos, email campaigns, and much more. Assets like these help you generate awareness, build interest, get buyers to consider and evaluate your product or service, and eventually buy it. 

If you want your pipeline filled with a steady, predictable stream of leads that represent your ideal buyer, you can’t skimp on marketing assets.

Tips for Building and Optimizing Your Assets

The volatile economy has some companies getting a little jittery. Your competitors may be pulling back a bit on their sales and marketing. That’s good news for you. If your business is committed to growing, you can get ahead of the competition by taking advantage of their decision to retreat.

By building and optimizing your marketing assets while competitors are shrinking into their shells, you’ll stay top of mind with the B2B buyers who still need your products and services.   

Here are some practical tips to get you started.

Get your website working harder

Given that so much of the B2B buying journey happens online now—before the buyer ever engages with a sales rep—you need to treat your website like a sales engine that never sleeps. If your site isn’t drawing in and engaging your ideal buyer, you won’t see a steady stream of leads that turn into closed deals.

Use this time to focus on some website quick wins. For example:

• Optimize your webpage loading speed. Did you know that if your webpages load slow, Google will ding you on your search engine rankings? It’s true! Research shows your traffic could drop as much as 20 percent if your page load speed goes up by just one second. A few tweaks can get your pages loading faster, your site ranking higher, and your web traffic trending up.
• Develop pillar pages to drive more traffic. If you’re seeing a lot of website traffic aimed at a certain topic, that’s a sign that you need a pillar page. A pillar page is a comprehensive, all-in-one-place resource for lots of content about a particular subject. Buyers that want to dig deep on a topic are drawn to well-written pillar pages. Google loves them, too, so they’ll help improve your search engine results!
• Build landing pages that convert. It’s not enough to generate a lot of leads. You want those leads to convert to sales. And that’s what a hard-working landing page helps you do. It’s where a buyer ends up after clicking on a link in one of your marketing assets. By crafting a landing page with a compelling headline, a clear call to action, and a brief, easy-to-use form, you’ll see a higher rate of buyers ready for a sales touch.

LEARN MORE: 10 “Quick Win” Optimizations to Drive Traffic and Leads

Turn marketing automation into a competitive advantage

Lots of people equate marketing automation with email marketing distribution, but that’s just a small slice of what tools like HubSpot can do. To get the best ROI from your marketing budget, you need a solid automation tool AND you need to maximize how you use it.

To optimize your marketing automation, try ideas like these: 

• Use branching logic. If you want buyers to keep moving down your revenue funnel until they turn into sales, you need to guide them every step of the way. The branching logic feature in tools like HubSpot makes it easy to automatically deliver the right message to the right buyer at the right time, based on their past behaviors. 
• Score those leads! You need to focus your finite resources where they’ll generate the best ROI. By using the lead scoring function in your marketing automation tool, you can target your efforts on the most qualified buyers—those with the greatest likelihood to turn into customers.
• Get the handoff right. CEOs often tell us they’re generating leads, but they’re not turning into closed deals. Many times, the culprit is a poor process for handing off warm leads to sales—causing leads to leak right out of the pipeline. Use your marketing automation tool to plug those holes, ensure you’re only passing along leads that are ready for a sales touch, and equip sales to easily track and manage leads in their court.

Stockpile high-impact content

You don’t want to attract any-old traffic; you want the high-quality traffic that comes from organic search results. And that requires high-impact content. The more content you offer on your site and the higher the quality, the better your success in capturing new leads organically, early in their buying journey.

Here are some easy ways to build and optimize your content:

• Repurpose older content. Turn a webinar into a blog post, create an infographic from content in one of your guides, or dust off an older blog that’s still relevant but could use updating. Repackaging your content can get more eyes on it and boost your search engine rankings.
• Ramp up your blog volume. A blog is one of the most effective and efficient tools for generating organic traffic. But if you’re not posting new blog content often, you’re missing the boat. To turn up the volume on your blog, brainstorm topics with your team and create a content calendar. By committing to what you’ll publish and when, you’re more likely to keep the content flowing. 
• Get creative. If you’re short on copywriting bandwidth to create written content, or your SMEs don’t have time to put pen to paper, turn to video instead. Get a SME to record a two-minute how-to video or ask a customer to record their testimonial. It’s a great way to round out your content without overtaxing your team.       

RELATED: How to Drive Conversions with Content Marketing

Refresh your social media presence

When was the last time your team looked at their LinkedIn profiles? How often are you posting relevant information that attracts leads and conveys thought leadership? Are you using social media to engage with buyers—or are you simply doing the obligatory once-a-week post?

To optimize your social media, you need to show it some love. Ideas like these can help:

• Refresh your LinkedIn profiles. Make sure your leadership team at a minimum—but ideally everyone in your company—has a solid LinkedIn profile. Create compelling headlines and an engaging Summary section that tells a story your buyers can relate to. The same goes for your company LinkedIn page (which every business should have).
• Create a social media calendar. Just like a content calendar keeps you accountable for generating new content, a social media calendar ensures you’re posting something relevant regularly. Include a mix of post types—for example, promote your newest blog post, re-share a news blurb about your company, or pose a thought-provoking question.
• Don’t just post—engage! If you’re using social media as a one-way channel, you’re completely missing the idea. Scroll through your social feeds, see if people are commenting on your posts, and find opportunities to comment back in a relevant, meaningful way.      

Keeping the pedal to the metal on marketing during tough economic times is the best way to keep your business in front of buyers and generate leads that convert to sales. And Marketri’s fractional approach to B2B marketing is the right strategy in these volatile times! Our fractional model is the cost-effective, results-driven approach that helps growth-minded companies thrive in any economy.

Contact us to learn about our fractional marketing services and how they can help you generate more leads and more revenue.