Five strategies to make marketing more efficient

1 Nov

The world is facing pronounced economic challenges. Marketing teams must react by becoming more efficient and effective. This makes a CMOs role ever more precarious.

We therefore use behavioural economics to explain five strategies that can be used to make marketing more effective while maintaining the relationships and creativity within the marketing team.

1. Build agility

In an economic downturn, unlike the good times that preceded it, turbulence is expected, and market conditions can change rapidly. Signs of improvement can be quickly followed by the opposite, which makes agility the most important feature within a marketing department. This requires the ability to manage campaigns with greater flexibility, and pull marketing budgets from one channel to another.

This agility can be built by focusing on the communication between the CMO and their senior team, with a focus on making sure decisions are made swiftly and agreed in unison, often when there is incomplete information.

2. Re-align marketing teams

One of the greatest concerns for any marketing team in a downturn is that there will be job losses. This is inevitable if budgets are cut as the business prepares itself. Furthermore, the quickest and most effective way to maintain morale is by reshuffling the team to become more aligned with the market requirements.

Any economic downturn will be accompanied by shifts in marketing channel viability, and the quickest way to remain effective is to align marketing activities in line with the shifts and incorporate changes in personnel at the same time.

3. Streamline agency setups

In the good times, marketing agencies provide a melting pot of ideas. In difficult times, they can become a burden on time and money. However, this doesn’t mean that agencies should be removed entirely as they often deliver the ideas and creativity that elevate the brand, even in a downturn.

Instead, a CMO should carefully consider the viability of each agency based on the market conditions and retain those that provide the highest value. This may result in a greater concentration of work within one or two key agencies. Alternatively, it may mean hiring specialists at the expense of broader agencies.

4. Re-assess SaaS contracts

Every marketing team will be committed to a broad spectrum of SaaS digital marketing tools. In a downturn, these require much closer scrutiny to ensure that they deliver value. The CMO can therefore consider the value against cost using a set of metrics that run this process objectively. This may be critical if the other strategies mentioned above are employed, as the team’s skills and size will shift to be more agile to the market conditions.

If performed well, this process should only add value to the business, while also delivering cost efficiencies. In fact, if some tools are over-performing, there may be an opportunity to redistribute resources to them, giving the marketing team a feeling that there is more to use when the net output will result in savings.

5. Monitor the situation

The media agenda can become fractious during an economic downturn, as negative issues rise to the top of news outlets and their pervasiveness spreads throughout society. This makes marketing teams more prone to launching products at times that are out of risk of being lost in a sea of negative societal conversation. For this reason, CMOs would be wise to remain on top of media trends and the cycle of key issues when planning major campaigns and budget allocations.

Implementing them effectively

These five strategies are essentially the de facto approach that marketers use in an economic downturn. We have simply summarised them to sharpen the thinking that surrounds them. Beyond this, the speed at which these strategies can be employed is dependent on the quality of the information available to make decisions swiftly and accurately.

The reality is that few, if any, businesses generate all the information they need to make these decisions internally. Simply relying on company data easily leads to a myopic viewpoint. Instead, major brands typically refer to industry data and industry benchmarks to establish the principles for this process. All decisions are very much affected by the competitive landscape and broader societal trends that determine the attractiveness of each market.

If you’d like to know how we perform this process, then please get in touch. We’ve built a depth of research to better understand key aspects of business performance and the principles that explain how they work. For example, budget allocation by researching team sizes or the metrics for selecting agencies.

We hope you enjoyed reading.

See you next time.