During times of business hardship, the marketing budget is often cut. This becomes more likely when a recession hits and businesses look to further cut costs. Smarter businesses continue investing in marketing and R&D at the same level (or sometimes higher) to help sustain business growth and success in the long term, whilst looking for operational efficiencies that can be gained through introducing new ways of working, optimising systems and tools and focusing on data-driven marketing.
When budgets are reduced, there is often increased pressure on the marketing team to demonstrate the value of their efforts. Marketers can combat this by clearly demonstrating the impact and contribution of their efforts. Moving towards more agile ways of working and becoming more data-driven in your marketing approach is key. Not only does this allow you to report on performance more accurately, but also delve into insights that inform your strategy and provide evidence to support where to prioritise your limited resources.
Not only can data provide insight into the effectiveness of current activity, but it also aids informed decision-making to drive improvement. Working within an experimentation framework, and using the data generated to provide valuable insight early into what is and isn’t working, helping you make an informed decision on whether to pivot or persevere quickly.
Data-driven marketing increases ROI, with campaigns that leverage data-driven personalisation reporting 5-8x ROI for their campaign spend.