What Can B2B Tech Marketers Do In Times of a Recession?

Amid the global big tech layoffs that have been a consistent feature in the tech market, something that is in part being attributed to a global recession and fall in customer sentiment and demand, marketers and sales people as well as every other customer-facing team member needs to understand what they can do better to drive brand growth and market share while retaining their existing customers.

Marketing in the modern-day scenario is meant to be more performance and ROI driven and for brands that still attribute too many vanity metrics or vanity processes to their marketing efforts, now is as good a time as any to begin tightening overall marketing processes as well as measurement tactics.

With constant fear and news of an economic recession, instead of falling prey to how a downturn can negatively impact a brand’s growth or team, being more critical about what strategies to pursue (and why) can save brand’s a lot of hardships.

Here are a Few Factors that can Help:

Evaluate Who Does What in Marketing and Marketing Ops, Build Better Measurement Process

When companies grow, they tend to budget more towards hiring objectives and team expansion plans. Many a time, if this is not done in the right manner, it can lead to over hiring and instances of fewer tasks assigned to each person.

At a time when measuring every tactic to ensure there is growth and ROI for everything that is done, understanding how tasks are divided to evaluate whether a team needs to be made to work in a slightly more lean manner is critical to future success.

This is where marketing leaders, especially those who have been told about budget cuts need to figure out whether it’s time to realign marketing operations and sales operations executives while also diving deeper into what processes need to be measured better to ensure there’s ROI from most of them.

For instance, if a team has been assigned to regularly run a brand email marketing blast once a week based on data of prospects that are interested in the product/service: understanding whether fewer numbers can do the task / evaluating whether the email blast is giving the brand ROI or replies that can be passed on to customer-facing sales reps / understanding whether the same team can drive other marketing campaigns through other online mediums and channels is critical to driving more output at a time when market conditions are already tougher than usual.

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Understand whether your MarTech-SalesTech needs a Rethink

Too many martech-salestech systems can lead to disjointed processes and lower output. In reality, a full-fledged marketing-sales team does not need a plethora of martech or salestech systems to drive growth.

The key lies in integrating the best-fit platforms between the two teams (for instance, a common CRM/CDP), while using common processes between the two teams to tighten how marketing outreach aligns to sales outreach so that better handover processes can be put into practice.

Deeply aligned marketing-sales processes as well as well-integrated martech-salestech systems can ensure that customer facing sales teams enjoy a more stringent approach to maintaining or capturing leads, this can eventually give way to healthier lead pipelines for the business and reduce instances of sales teams feeling that leads are just MQLs but not necessarily SQLs.

Each brand will need a different set of martech-salestech tools at a time to drive growth and output, based on the current state of business goals and projected plans. Understanding how to optimize both, processes and systems to create better alignment between these two teams (marketing-sales) is key to optimizing actual revenue and growth, especially during a downtime.

Being More Targeted in Your Future Approach

At a time when market hardships are threatening stability and brand growth prospects, marketers and sales people need to be smarter about what they do in terms of strategies.

For marketers and advertising teams, defining whether a more targeted ABM approach can be beneficial during this time or understanding more about which marketing processes need to be dropped is critical to protecting the team from layoffs while also trying to ensure actual revenue/ROI.

For advertisers: targeting or retargeting interested prospects, for marketers, reaching out to only those prospects who have shown intent to buy into your product in the recent past can help lower the marketing costs and resources associated with running too many brand campaigns.

This is the time to redefine what needs to be done (and why) so that the right strategies can be pursued with the aim of reducing existing customer churn and trying to grab more market share.

Ride the Recession Wave…

A recession can impede brand growth as well as individual targets. Marketing and sales leaders who have the right focus and agenda in place can help their companies and teams tide over these cycles and times. Being more targeted yet innovative in future campaigns, understanding the market changes and identifying what can trigger a sale based on your product-service fit and value, defining how you can stay above water and more importantly, above your competitor is key to trying to drive brand success during this time.

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