KMG Fortifying your brand in a downturn: Part 2: Three marketing moves in a tighter spending environment
By Todd Olsen, VP of Marketing Practice
Take a pragmatic look at your marketing spend, but don’t pull the whole thing!
Last week in Part 1 of our Fortifying your brand in a downturn series, we curated a list of VC advice to founders for navigating a downturn. Many VCs and outlets have weighed in - some of them stopping just short of telling founders to move back into the garage and start stocking up on ramen.
Downturn or no, there’s a lot of healthy discourse on planning for multiple outcomes, good and bad, and we agree that evaluating spending is always a productive exercise. We also believe that the exuberant amount of spending on Facebook click-through is both unsustainable and unhealthy.
Before you take the hatchet to your entire marketing budget, first consider these three moves to unlock efficiency and shore up your foundation in the event of a downturn:
Choose to focus on customers who will get the word out for you.
Your best customers are the ones who love you just as much as you love them. This is a function of problem fit (which is the customer-centric version of product fit). If you solve a person’s problem in a value-aligned way that even slightly exceeds their expectations, they will work for you to tell all of their friends and colleagues who have the same problem about your brand. That’s a flywheel.
Clean up your brand value proposition.
If you try to be everything to everybody, you are nothing to anyone. Take the time to define, then align your brand value proposition. We use a simple tool that asks about five key questions: Who is your target customer, what problem do they have, how do you solve it better than anyone else, what are the three reasons they should believe it, and how do they feel afterwards. Tip: to move someone into a new pattern (with your product) you have to be significantly better than their current solution at solving the problem - inertia is a powerful force to be reckoned with.
Map your customer’s journey to find the friction.
Every journey from problem to solution is fraught with friction. The good news: without friction, there’s no sale. Friction is your friend, and we use CJM to identify where it is, then create a clean marketing program to intersect customers in that moment. This leads to a more efficient, minimum viable marketing plan that gets to the most efficient moments. Thoughtful CJM-ing can also get you a few steps upstream of the competitive and obvious “buy box” where everyone is bidding for the same eyeballs.
At Kingston Marketing Group we work with a lot of start-ups with limited budgets. We always start with a minimalist attitude towards your customer, brand and marketing programs - so you can create a brand foundation, test and learn to a playbook, then grow from a foundation of strength.
We’ve developed a Brand and Marketing Tune-up that uses the above process to examine your customer, brand and marketing programs to provide you with a fresh start to build from - regardless of the economic situation. Schedule a free 30 minute consultation here - we’d love to talk with you.