Here is an insightful post from one of my favorite marketing bloggers, Ardath Albee, Lead Nurturing Belongs in Your Recession Strategy:
I’ve seen so many posts about how to fight the negative impacts of a recession on business success that it’s making me crazy. Why is it that people wait until it’s announced that we’re finally in a recession before they start doing what they could’ve been doing all along?
Customer-focused lead nurturing is one of the best ways to prevent experiencing an adverse impact to customer acquisition during a recession.
Here are a few meaty reasons why lead nurturing is a recession buster…
- You’re already growing a relationship with people who’ve given you their permission to contact them with relevant content.
- This means you can reach out with proactive dialogue to both learn about what’s keeping them up at night due to this economic shift and then ease their concerns by helping them make the best choices during risky times.
- You can create marketing content to address these concerns and give them helpful ideas for riding out the storm so they’re in a better position when the winds change.
- Providing continuity of experience during tough times raises your viability as a long-term partner choice.
- Whatever you do, don’t stop now. If you cut and run to save budget you’re not only wasting leads, but you’re showing them you’ll jump ship when the going gets tough.
- Do NOT start panicking and use hard-sell tactics. Stick to your story. Your confidence and stability during a downturn does a lot for your company’s reputation, not to mention showing people they can trust you to stay focused on what’s best for them.
If your leads were interested in your product offerings before the recession, they probably need you now, more than ever. Keep in mind that they’ll buy eventually and your goal is to have them buy from your company. Don’t be pushy, be helpful. Prove to your leads that you’re the trusted advisor they’ve been looking for.
If nothing else, a recession gives you the perfect venue for proving you’re focused on them. Nurturing an audience you already have is much more lucrative than flailing about for short-term sales.
In fact, if you go to the trouble to find out how the economy is conflicting with their decision to buy, you’ve got the opportunity to show them the pros and cons of putting off a decision that can deliver a business value they can’t afford to put off.
Lead nurturing belongs in your marketing strategy mix—recession or not.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great article. Another benefit of marketing in a recession is the ability to use fear in your copywriting. Psychologists attempt to explain the mind and brain in the context of real life. Psychologists study such phenomena as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Marketers attempt to exploit the mind and brain in the context of business and capitalism.
There is no greater emotion to ping in your prospects than that of fear if you want to increase your sales. People buy because of fear. People fear death. They fear getting old. They fear going broke. They fear missing out.
Fear comes in many forms and is the most powerful motivator causing people to buy. Always try to work fear into your marketing literature.
OnStar used fear to make billions. Their best pulling ad was an actual recorded call of a little girl saying, “We just had an accident and my Mom isn’t moving, please help!” This planted the idea in peoples minds that what if that happened to me when I was driving? What would my daughter do if we did not have OnStar?
Perhaps the most famous use of fear in advertising ever was Tony Schwartz’s legendary ‘Daisy Ad’ for the Johnson campaign. Schwartz suffered from agoraphobia, an abnormal fear of open or public places, and so he understood the controlling power of fear very well.
The ad was broadcast on Sept. 7, 1964, during NBC’s “Monday Night at the Movies.” It showed a little girl in a meadow (in reality a Manhattan park), counting aloud as she plucks the petals from a daisy. Her voice dissolves into a man’s voice counting downward, followed by the image of an atomic blast. President Johnson’s voice is heard on the soundtrack:
“These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”
The tragedy that results in market cycles, like this recession, can be used to make money. I wrote a sales letter for a property management company that advertised their single family home services with the headline, “Afraid Of Losing Your Home To Foreclosure?”
Excellent article and I can\’t agree more on how much important lead nurturing will be now more than ever. It will be critical for B2B marketers to leverage all the relationships they developed over the past several quarters and engage with their leads to educate them and personalize their pitch using a combination of intelligence nurturing software as well as activity-trigged human reach out.
Thanks for the reassuring “stay on course” message. It is difficult not to over react to changes in the marketplace. Changes in marketing usually take place slowly so for now, if you keep the message sincere and personal, you’ll be a step ahead of the rest.