When cash flow gets tight, it’s often marketing that sees the axe first. With a little creative thinking, you can turn this budget reduction into an opportunity to evaluate your existing marketing strategy, help your company through the downtime, but also provide a more budget effective strategy for the future.
If you are like many small businesses, you probably have a chunk of your marketing budget in digital ad platforms like Google Adwords, and Facebook/Instagram Ads as well as some sort of content creation and promotion strategy. No matter how effective these channels are at driving traffic and sales during a normal period, if those customers aren’t converting because they don’t have money to spend, it might be time to cut the costs of your paid ad platforms. Intentionally dropping a paid channel of advertising can be scary, but attracting customers that aren’t buying, really isn’t a great strategy.
Hopefully, you have some sort of attribution set up to track where your leads come from and which of those leads are buying. Google Analytics is usually the first place people go, but there are other tools out there for you to use. No matter, what attribution system or tool you use, make sure something is in place. If you don’t have something running, it’s time to get that setup. Shopify has a pretty solid starting point for understanding Multi-Channel Attribution.
Dropping Marketing Channels
First and foremost, if you stop using a marketing channel, you immediately are saving money you don’t have to use. In a time where cash flow reigns supreme, saving some money isn’t an option its’ a necessity.
During a pandemic like COVID-19, you have a rare opportunity to cut channels. This allows you to get an inside look at how your funnel is performing and how well your attribution is working. When we work with data to make marketing decisions, it’s not that difficult to get led astray even for the most prudent professionals. For example, perhaps you are using a “last interaction” model for conversion attribution and normally see a large portion of your converting traffic coming from organic search. That might lead you to believe that your content marketing efforts are very effective. I mean, people are searching and finding all the amazing content you have put out into the world. However, once you turn off your paid marketing, you start to see your organic search conversion rates plummet. Why would that be? If your content was truly king, it shouldn’t have been hit so hard, right? It could be that people were finding your articles, but only after they came across that boosted post or clicked on an ad a month earlier. By the time they had converting, but they were only there in the sales cycle because they had been interacting with your paid ads.
By turning off your paid channels, you can see that you should be spending more time improving the effectiveness of your ad spend.
Or maybe you find the opposite to be true. Your conversion rates barely move after turning off your paid spend even though your analytics data was showing you that a large number of your customers were converting from paid ads. It’s possible that those customers were searching for your company and a paid ad showed up above your organic result and they were clicking that instead. It doesn’t change the fact they were already looking for you, just that you were unnecessarily raising your customer acquisition costs.
With fewer channels operating it is easier to see what works and what doesn’t and make positive changes to your marketing strategy that will help your business today and after the crisis.
Checking Attribution Models
Now that you’ve started playing around with what channels are actually bringing you the most customers, it’s time to look at your attribution models. Google Analytics has some attribution settings you can learn about and implement into your analytics quite easily.
Using the example above, if your content creation was only effective because of your beautiful ads got people thinking about your company and service/product, it might be time to switch to different attribution model, like Last Google Ads Click.
Or maybe, you realized that your content was the best source of converting leads and your paid sources really only contribute a small amount of value to your sales funnel. That means it’s time to switch to a first interaction model to get a more accurate acquisition cost now that you’ve cut spending on some of your brand name Adwords campaigns.
Your data output is only as good as the input, so make sure you are using the right attribution model to get the most out of your marketing spend, once you have it back.
Old Data During New Times
These times are unprecedented and businesses of all sizes are facing challenges that would never have shown up in any models or marketing budgets. Your existing data and marketing goals are likely not of value to your decision making right now, but you can benefit from learning more about your customers and your channels by taking risks that you normally wouldn’t feel comfortable doing when things are going well.
Your old data that helped make your small business marketing successful likely won’t apply during this pandemic, but that doesn’t mean you should throw it out the window. By making changes and improving your understanding of your current marketing effectiveness with risks you would never be able to take in normal circumstances, you’ll be able to supercharge your old data when things start to settle in our new normal.
Good luck out there. Stay safe. Don’t forget to wash your hands and physically distance yourself. We will get through this together by supporting and helping each other out.