The past few weeks have been hard to predict and react to, and the immediate future appears uncertain. We don’t need to rehash the impacts of market instability.

Companies are doing their best to chart a path forward, and many ask, “Where can we cut back?” Some are shifting energy and investment away from marketing to focus on material, supply chain, and distribution issues.

While shrinking marketing spend is logical, it may be an unnecessary tradeoff, and potentially a huge mistake.

We’ve been through another recent period of extreme market instability. We learned of longer-term sales and profit losses caused by shifting budgets away from marketing and advertising in reaction to the pandemic in 2020, from which some companies never recovered. The long-term financial negatives outweighed the near-term benefits of pausing or reducing marketing spend.

When marketing and advertising are paused, efficiencies are lost. Performance marketers highlight that it takes weeks, and sometimes months, to ramp back up in marketing channels. The net effect can be inefficiency in spend (aka wasted budget) and an increasing number of lost sales in the short and long term.

Modern marketers (or so we like to think of ourselves) also know that increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing is a powerful combination that can elevate sales and profit.  So, it forces the question… Why stop or scale down at the most critical times when marketing continuity, efficiency, and effectiveness are needed now more than ever?  

You don’t have to pause or cut marketing. And, you don’t have to risk immediate and long-term sales and revenue.

Instead, ask yourself and your team, “How can I improve my marketing efficiency to drive business results in this uncertain economic environment and mitigate the mounting pressure to reduce unnecessary company spend?”

Finding the right answer can position you well against competition for short-term viability and long-term growth because you avoid cutting and going dark (or at least dim).

We recommend an important first move, that many marketers have already taken: further hone and identify your target consumer group(s) as they currently exist. Whether you use traditional segmentation and targeting, or let the algorithm find your audience in real-time, an unexpected and real benefit is learning who not to market to so you can focus resources and investments on the most likely consumers in the present market conditions. One of the most important datasets to elevate understanding of your consumer is your historical sales, so collect your data, analyze it, and look for patterns you can leverage for targeting.

New opportunity is created once your audience(s) is appropriately identified and updated. The goal is to reach as many of the right audience as possible, both those in the market for your good/service and those who one day will be. Many businesses have already done this step.

Our next recommended step is a high hurdle to turning opportunity into profit: the world of paid media. Paid media is expensive, and costs continue to rise across most channels. Marketing, and all the channels and opportunities, from TV to radio, to print, to shelf space, to end caps, to retail media, to paid social, to search, to trade shows, and everything in between, can require a sizeable financial investment for it to yield good results. Underfunding marketing is common and eventually results in managing disappointment and explaining missed sales goals.

How do we make modern media spend more efficient? The first step is realizing that not all buyers, even those you’re identified as more valuable opportunities, are evenly spread out across a country/region/state/city. The second step is awareness that not all potential buyers have the same level of potential revenue.

Similar to industries clustering in specific regions of the country, like higher education and healthcare in the northeast, technology in the northwest, automotive in the Midwest, finance in the mid-Atlantic, manufacturing and energy in the south, not all buyers live in all places. Leveraging this concept at a cutting-edge level can greatly increase your likelihood of sale. 

This truth helps us answer our keystone question: “How can I improve my marketing efficiency to drive business results in this uncertain economic environment with mounting pressure to reduce unnecessary spend?”

Strategic data science initiatives are the key differentiating component that has helped our client partners get more out of their media spend, and sometimes even reduce spend without jeopardizing sales and profit. Data science, and geospatial data science in particular, have identified opportunities for growth and marketing optimization otherwise undiscovered and unutilized. We can identify new match markets for expansion and optimize targeting for all major ad platforms by better defining underlying conditions driving sales patterns and where to invest for the next client or consumer.

Read about our Bryant case study here.

Read about our Northeast Bank case study here.

We also have additional client partners who have already benefited from this strategy or are currently implementing it.

What has proven exciting about our data science offering, on top of the more efficient media spend, is that it occurs in parallel to marketing. Nothing needs to pause while the analysis is completed and reviewed.

Before you decide to cut marketing budgets and potentially losing hard fought market share, consider the more exciting option of maximizing them. If this sounds like an opportunity to help your business continue to reach its goals, no matter the macroeconomic uncertainty, please get in touch. We’d be thrilled to discuss the opportunity and impact.