Recession-Proof Your Content Strategy: Create Value When Budgets Are Tight
Authors
Chris Salazar
Innovative marketing executive with a 18+ year proven track record of driving market expansion, increasing revenue, and elevating market awareness for Fortune 500 companies.
In this article
Introduction
Replace panic with planning when you face a recession. Every aspect of your content strategy must deliver measurable results and align tightly with your audiences’ priorities. Especially now, your team must prioritize maintaining engagement, delivering value, and maximizing ROI even as budgets and other resources are constrained.
When you zero in on high-impact, cost-effective content and align it with your audiences’ needs, you’ll weather the tough times and position your brand well for subsequent growth. Your content strategy during an economic downturn is a highly focused subset of your long-term content marketing strategy. It’s not easy, so let us help with useful insights and strategies for a recession-proof content strategy.
Be Confident and Credible
A recession affects your customers as well. They, too, struggle with smaller budgets and bigger risks than before. As they look for support and solutions to their challenges, they quickly learn who their friends are. Be that friend and earn their trust with genuine commitment to their needs. You both need reliable partnerships.
Build and maintain loyalty by developing practical content that addresses your customers’ immediate obstacles and concerns, such as cost management or efficiency improvements. Offer the full context of your brand’s values and customer dedication through relevant thought leadership and well-told case studies.
You can also build in content generated by your user communities to ensure credibility and utility even as you lower your content creation costs. For example, feature customer reviews, testimonials, or shared tips to highlight real-world successes and build trust.
Refine and Repurpose
A continuous supply of fresh content is the hallmark of high-performing content marketing during a crisis. It’s essential to consistently demonstrate your expertise and leadership.
But it doesn’t have to be entirely new content. Refine and repurpose your existing, proven content to build a high-performing library of new, cost-effective assets. Adjust a successful e-book for one customer segment to offer relevant insights to another segment.
Chunk a popular white paper or webinar into shorter formats, such as blog posts, infographics, video vignettes, and more. Refresh outdated assets with new data or insights to keep them relevant and just as valuable.
Prioritize and Purge
Recession-proof content must deliver the most value in every piece. Replace content from the boom times with timely assets that address your audiences’ urgent needs and offer useful solutions.
Publish guides that solve industry-specific challenges. Feature customer success stories that show how your solutions help them navigate economic downturns. Host webinars or create video tutorials that detail useful advice and strategies.
In addition to solutions that include your products, consider a broader range of insights that help your customers succeed – and demonstrate your authenticity and leadership.
Adapt and Adjust
With a changing economic outlook, your customers are shifting their priorities. Are you shifting your audience personas to match? Don’t forget to recalibrate your strategies to remain relevant to your markets’ new demands.
Align your content with values that resonate during tough times, including costs savings or efficiency gains. Harness the immediacy of social media to make direct connections in real-time with your customers. Tune your content syndication choices to support your new market dynamics. Most of all, stay agile by regularly reassessing your assumptions about your customers’ needs.
Download our Content Syndication eBook to learn how to adapt your strategy and stay ahead in changing market conditions!
Strategize and Synchronize
Keep the big picture in mind as you time your content strategically across the months. Align with seasonal trends you’ve discovered. Understand and meet the expectations of your audiences to reduce friction and ensure relevance.
For example, you can plan your content calendar around top pain points and industry trends – both traditional and emerging ones. Here you want to focus on quality over quantity. When customers and prospects are under pressure, your first engagement must squarely hit the mark. By building your credibility, you will drive better engagements and results.
Monitor and Measure
ROI is your watchword. It’s critical to track your content’s performance to adjust for success and to justify investments. Your data-driven insights refine strategies and boost your returns. Rely on well-known monitoring tools such as Google Analytics, SEMRush, and HubSpot to develop KPIs that will help you adjust your tactics.
Research and Repeat
You are not alone. Other B2B companies have transformed their strategies with value-driven content creation in good times and bad. Study them for insights you can apply. Here are three quick examples, but we urge you to research among your competitors and peers.
- American Express developed “Small Business Saturday” in 2010 to encourage consumers to shop locally. It’s become a year-round, global campaign and has enabled over $200 billion in sales. You can be sure that by championing their small business customers in such a tangible way, American Express strengthened brand trust as they influenced significant economic benefits.
- Zoom responded to the recent pandemic’s disruption by creating extensive content about virtual events and webinars for B2B customers and prospects. With free resources, best practices, and case studies they helped businesses quickly transition to online communication. Their content strategy not only helped their customers but also established Zoom as an effective partner for virtual meetings and events, earning them a share price increase of 500% at its peak.
- Mailchimp expanded its content to support small businesses during the economic downturn in 2020. They created a resource center with guides, webinars, and other tools to help small businesses adapt to the new economic environment. The content strategy demonstrated Mailchimp’s commitment to its core customers, strengthening their loyalty. In 2021, Intuit acquired Mailchimp for $12 billion.
Adopt and Achieve
High-performing content during an economic downturn is much like B2B content marketing’s best practices during prosperous times. But the stakes are higher, and strategies must be more precise. You and other marketing leaders can recession-proof your B2B content strategies to create and deliver value to your customers, engaging and delighting them along the way.
The key is to hone your efforts to build trust, improve existing assets, address urgent needs, and base decisions on experience, judgment, and data. Adopt these principles to navigate through economic challenges and emerge stronger and more resilient – several steps ahead of your competitors.
Adopt these principles to navigate through economic challenges and emerge stronger and more resilient – several steps ahead of your competitors.
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