How to Crush It in Economic Downturns: Marketing Tips | David Weinberger

EPISODE 1 – Why Cutting Ad Spend During a Downturn is a Huge Mistake 

00:00.749 Wondering if cutting marketing budget during tough times is the right move? In this episode, you’ll learn why increasing ad spend during recessions can boost your business, how to communicate this strategy to stakeholders, the importance of data for return on investment, and how to capitalize on reduced competition. And more on this episode of Content on the Go. Hey everyone, I’m Darren Lake and welcome to Content On The Go, a podcast by Podpaste. Each episode, we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest, short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. On this episode, I’m talking to someone that I’ve worked with very closely, and I’d call it your friend, Mr. David Weinberger. He’s a fractional growth marketer and B2B marketing leader with over 10 years experience in the industry. He’s worked with companies like Mortgage Choice, Starcom MediaVest Group, and Paperform, and he’s an all around awesome guy. Let’s get into it. We’ve got a lot of points that we’re going to get through on this. Let’s talk about the first one, which is clean your data. I’ve never heard anything like this. You’re an expert marketer. Please tell me what clean your data means.

01:02.952 I think if you look at some historical data that the best businesses that experience these downturns often invest more heavily in their ads. And they do this for a couple of reasons, advertising specifically within the marketing discipline, and they do this for a good reason. So if the market is down, let’s say 12%, What will likely happen is you’ll see a bigger reduction in marketing spend across many competitors. So maybe 50%, which leaves a gaping hole for someone to fill with a better share of voice, a good opportunity to push your brand, push your messaging and your value proposition. in what is essentially a void of communication. So a good example of this would be Target in, I think it was 2009, whilst they didn’t decrease their spend, they actually increased it, which not only led them to bigger market share in that year, but also they were one of the few, especially large businesses that came out of that really tumultuous period with better results at the end of it than they did going into it. So there are lots of examples like this where it doesn’t necessarily mean just because the market is going down that you should spend less on your advertising.

02:27.725 Yeah, I’d say it’s, it’s quite emotionally, it’s hard to do that. You know, if you’re new to your business and this is the first down cycle you’ve had emotionally, it’s easier said than done. And it’s like, you know, being in the stock market or whatever market.

02:43.814 That’s a really good point because as you were talking, I was thinking of the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett. He says, when you buy groceries, do you buy them at full price or do you like to buy them when they’re on sale? And he’s really referring to the stock market, but the same parallel can be made for marketing, share of voice, share of the market. It’s really the same thing.

03:10.188 Yeah. So I guess I’ll dive a bit deeper into that because I love, uh, I love me some more on Buffett. Uh, he’s just his, the way he invests and does business is so logical and so boring, but he has, you know, he’s the best one out there and everyone wants the hack. And he’s like, just buy the businesses that you know, when everyone’s running left and, you know, selling, you should buy when everyone’s buying, you know, at the top of the market, you should not buy or sell like, you know, like that’s do the exact opposite of the crowd. easier said than done, you know, again, emotions. And especially when you’re back to small businesses, SMEs, marketers, it’s like, oh, my God, the world’s ending. You know, I might lose all this money. I might lose this client. I might lose these customers. How can I keep spending on all this marketing stuff? So. So, yeah. Do you have a emotional? I mean, it’s more psychological.

03:58.004 Can you be a therapist to some of these business owners? It’s a difficult one because every business finds themselves in really unique circumstances. No two businesses are the same and the challenges they face are always going to be different. So, whilst it might be easy for Target with huge cash reserves to go out and just pump more money, maybe reduce some of the operating costs, but then redistribute them into marketing, the same cannot always be said for small businesses who Cost per acquisition is high, cash is low, and it’s difficult to lend in markets like that. I mean borrow in markets like that. It depends. And I don’t want to be the Gary Vee who comes out and deals in absolutes like a Sith Lord and says, you’ve got to do this. And if you don’t do this, you’re the worst. And you have no idea what you’re doing. So it really does come down to your individual circumstances. So I would always caveat that. And that’s what a good marketer always says. It depends.

04:57.845 It depends, yeah. Look, no hate on Gary Vee. I’m a big fan of Gary Vee. I like his zero F’s attitude. Let’s go into this kind of third point that we actually haven’t talked about to end this, which is increase your share of voice. So, you know, point one was. navigating down markets. Point two was less people are spending on marketing ads. So take advantage of this new space. We talked about the Warren Buffett analogy. If you have the cash, if you have the confidence, believe in yourself, you know, talk to your accountant first, though, and talk to you, you know, your investors and your shareholders, if you’re that type of business. But yeah, number three, increase share voice. Tell me a bit more about that.

05:37.544 So, for those who aren’t familiar with the term share of voice, it really means the percentage of the market in which you are heard by your customers or your audience. So, measuring that can take a few different… You can look at search trends, you can look at mentions in social media and things like this. But really what it means is how are you tracking against your competitors in terms of who’s talking the loudest. really important. But I would also just deviate a little bit from that and just touch on what we spoke, you know, the original question about retention and possibly a very commonly known bit of marketing trivia, the law of, well, the rule of seven. Yeah, it’s seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, it changes, it depends. It depends. So the point is you need to be talking to your customers as frequently as possible. And in a market like this, and I can say this confidently, no matter how far into the future we’re looking here, but first party data is going to be really, really important. So when we talk about retention, you’ve got to have all your ducks in a row, all your user data, their personal information, making sure it’s all humming, and you’ve got the tools and the processes to take advantage of that. And that will be a great way for a lot of businesses to navigate a downturn, but also increase their share of voice. If we look at the workhorse of marketing, which is the email marketing, it’s one of the least sexy channels outside of just physical mail. But it is immensely important because it gives you access to your customers all the time for free. It ties together a lot of things like brand, comms, content, and it gives you access to people’s inbox for very little cost. So a great channel and a great way of making sure that you’re focusing on your share of voice and your attention, and you can do it that way.

07:59.541 From Podpaste, you’ve listened to content on the go. Again, I’m Darren and Podpaste hopes you found more insights and tips into your business or brand. If you’ve liked what you heard, please share a link with other businesses or marketers if you think they would get something from this. And for a limited time, we are offering two special services for people. The first is aimed at businesses that have never done podcasting and want to try it out before committing to a full series. Think, try before you buy where we will edit and repurpose a podcast episode into 10 pieces of content for you for only $95. That’s 82% off our normal rate. But if you’ve already have a podcast going, we’d love to edit an episode for free for you or repurpose it into 10 pieces of content to show you what is possible. Either way, sign up at the link in the show notes or YouTube description below to jump on a quick 10-minute discovery call where we can brainstorm ideas or audit your existing podcast and help shape your next series. See you on the next episode.

EPISODE 2 – Data, Email, Content, and CRO: The Ultimate Retention Guide

00:00.958 Want to boost customer retention effortlessly? In this episode, you’ll learn how to clean your data for better insights, invest in automated email marketing, leverage organic content, and optimize conversion rates through A-B testing and more on this episode of content on the go. Hey, everyone. I’m Darren Lake and welcome to content on the go a podcast by podcast. Each episode we answer questions or talk about one specific idea to help you market your business or brand better. And we do that by making them easy to digest short and concise, because we all have a business to run. Let’s go. On this episode, I’m talking to someone that I’ve worked with very closely and I’d call it to your friend, Mr. David Weinberger. He’s a fractional growth marketer and B2B marketing leader with over 10 years experience in the industry. He’s worked with companies like Mortgage Choice, Starcom MediaVest Group, and Paperform, and he’s an all around awesome guy. Let’s get into it.

01:16.096 Well, maybe I’ll take one step back and I might just say that make sure you’ve got the data before you start marketing, before you start putting content out there, you spend time and money into things like ads and all such things. It’s important. to have your ducks in a row with your data. So, okay, you’ve got them clicking on your content, your ads, but what are they doing on your website, your platform, and through the conversion funnel? So think about what is the typical user journey that someone will take? What are the most important parts of that journey? And how am I going to make sure that I understand what people are doing, where they’re dropping off, and also most importantly, why? So, you know, big data will give you insights into what people are doing, but some of the most valuable insights come from the qualitative side, where you ask why are users doing that, what’s their motivation, but what’s also the biggest point of friction for them, what’s holding them back from completing the checkout, from completing the sign-up form and things like that. One of the very first things I did at Medi-G when I started was I went to the CEO and I said, you know, we don’t have enough information on this journey of users. We can’t say that we should be investing money in certain parts of our marketing funnel because we don’t even understand what the funnel looks like. So attributing, the ability to attribute your marketing activity to certain user behavior means that you can go back and optimize and pull more resources into really ramping that up. So it really helps you define which channels are working and which aren’t. When it comes to cleaning your data, you know, good data in means good insights out. Another thing I came across when we first started was, like most startups, you’re putting things together really, really quickly. And we had the same information in multiple different locations, and that caused duplication of information. But with that duplicate information, it meant that if we were running, let’s say, an email marketing series, a marketing campaign through email, Users were getting hit up with the same email twice because our data wasn’t clean. So sometimes it’s the grunt work of downloading the Excel doc, looking at it, doing some VLOOKUPs, removing the old ones, and making sure that it is sparkling. Because if that’s not right, then you’re going to create a really poor user experience. Just the same way you would for your product, you need to think the same about your marketing as well.

04:05.475 Those are great points all around. And let me talk about one specific kind of thing to look at. Review your historical trends. And by that, look at when things actually went down. And the last time you know that we can say things went down won’t really give you a timestamp on when this is right now, but it was back in COVID, March of 2020. you can see what was happening there. Even though it was actually a very short period of time, we thought that recession, quote, unquote, was going to be a while, it was more of a correction. You can see what was happening there and then use that to forecast or at least look forward with some of your data.

04:43.122 Yeah, sure. So it’s important to consider different types of data. Yes, it’s great if you’ve already got the data and you’ve done the legwork and your whole journey can be easily mapped and you’ve got all that first party data. But for a lot of small businesses and intermediate marketers, they might not have that historical data. It might only be able to be accessed through a third party. So a third party doesn’t mean things like cookies or anything, but it means that industry information. For every downturn, there are hundreds of economists and market researchers looking into what’s happening, why is it happening, and what’s the effect on not just the industry, but oftentimes your competitors, especially if you’re coming into a more mature market, there will be that information out there. And sometimes it’s as simple as just Googling it and seeing how can I best brace for what’s to come.

05:46.287 All right, let’s go into the second point here, which is invest in email marketing. And in the last episode, we actually talked about how email marketing is phenomenal because it’s, quote unquote, free, low cost, low resources ish, depending on, you know, how complex your email marketing. processes are. But yeah, tell me a bit more on investing in email marketing for your own business.

06:08.941 Sure. And, you know, my general philosophy is, you know, it’s very hard to leverage one channel without really having a strong product and a strong offering. Because Me personally, the products that I love, a good example is Mira, which is like a flowchart diagramming tool online. I look out for their email updates to say they’ve added a new feature. And a lot of people will feel the same. It could be the same about commerce as well. If you love a particular clothing brand, you can’t wait for their winter, summer, autumn collection to come out and you’re waiting for that. So really email is great once you’ve got the love of your brand there and that’s the first thing. If you’ve got that then email is where it’s at because you’ve built that equity and that buy-in before so you don’t have to have some really flashy clickbaity subject line, which help, they help.

07:17.018 That should always be optimized and tested, but… It doesn’t, sorry to interrupt, doesn’t have to be clickbaity. It could be a well-written headline that describes, you know, a solution or a problem.

07:30.165 Yeah. And it comes down to your definition of clickbait. If clickbait is like you’re fooling someone, then yeah, definitely don’t do that. You want to give them an insight into whatever great content you’ve got on the email is, but you need to capture their attention. And sometimes that’s what I refer to as clickbait.

07:50.877 Fair, fair. Yeah. And I think a lot of people, they Inside marketers, we say clickbait, but we know what it means. Like it’s still, you know, on the up and up, it’s still like clean and genuine and authentic. Yeah. Because clickbait is the you wouldn’t believe what this one thing did here. And then you click that like that. That’s clickbait. And try not to do that for any small business. That’s fine for a tabloid magazine. Yeah, that’s fine for, you know, that bottom. I call I think they call it not spam. They call it a. Chum Chum at the bottom of some blog post which is like all that stuff that’s generated by Outbrain and all that yeah, I shouldn’t have named them, but oh well It’s just those like clickbaity. It’s like you know thing this yeah You know this person made this much money in your suburb, and you’re just like that’s clickbait. Yeah, I’m just defining things and You can say, you know, 10 things to learn. This is how you’ll get better at this. And that’s just a strong title, I think.

08:47.706 Yeah, a hundred percent. And also just coming back to, you know, your original question around email, why email is important in the automation journey. So, you know, if you’ve always got limited resources, money is time. As much as you’ve got a set marketing budget, you’ve also got limited time. So you should always be looking to automate yourself out of a job. That’s my number one tip for people in the first five, six, seven years of employment is automate yourself out of the job so you can think and work on a higher level. So that’s the first thing. Email is great because, first of all, there’s a whole host of freemium products out there to get started with. There’s Campaign Monitor. or there are larger CRMs, even HubSpot has a freemium model. But they allow you to track all that data and then set triggers that allow you to communicate with the right people at the right time, which is the holy grail of marketing, isn’t it? It’s like what people always say is, you know, the right message to the right person at the right time. Email is really the easiest for people to grapple onto.

09:50.697 And to our third point, invest in organic content. So I’ve got my ideas of organic content, but tell me as a expert marketer that you are, what do you mean by investing in organic content?

10:05.043 So again, if you’re a business who is low on cash, but high on, let’s say things like time, and possibly resources internally with your team, then you can think about things outside of the realms of quick wins that ads usually drive. I think we were talking before about how ads are really the match to the gasoline on the fire. They get things going and they can drive quick results. But if you really want sustainable long-term growth, and results, you need to invest in content in organic channels as well. And that can only happen over time and with regular cadence. And that is regardless of channel. So we’re talking about social media, we’re talking about blog, we’re talking about podcasts. There is a threshold that you need to pass before you start being seen as an authority, not just to Google and the algorithm, but to people as well, which are often one and the same thing. So organic content is a long-term play for me. And, you know, when you think about the importance of content, again, it comes back to mapping out that user journey and then aligning the right content at the right parts of that journey. So you might deliver it through email, but that’s not, that’s an organic channel, but that’s not organic, you know, that’s not the content that goes into it. So you’ve got to have know your customer, know their journey, and this is kind of how it all ties together, and know their friction and pain points at certain parts and solve that with content in any format you so choose, as long as it works for the user.

11:45.228 And our last point is CRO. What does CRO mean? I have been in marketing for a while and I have I think I’ve seen that term and actually don’t know what it is. So tell everyone what it means. And in the context of this episode, how to improve your retention with automation in a spiraling downward cycle of the economy.

12:06.022 Sure. I guess the role that CRO plays is, and just to break down that abbreviation, it’s conversion rate optimization. Got you.

12:14.969 Now I know that makes a lot more sense.

12:17.031 Yeah, yeah. The marketing industry loves an acronym. But conversion rate optimization is really, you know, you can only take certain channels so far in terms of testing and improving to a point where you start to hit a bit of a glass ceiling. So it really addresses the concept of, OK, We’ve gotten the user to, let’s say, our website. But what is the experience we’re looking to give them there? And a lot of paid marketing specialists negate this as a real form of making the dollar stretch further. So if you can convert your user at twice the rate, but keep the amount of clicks to your website as a constant, then you’ve already halved your cost. So I think you have to think of it like that. And that often comes in the form of things like A-B testing, It can be really simple, such as things like copy, call to action, and you can do this with a raft of free tools like Google Optimize with a no-code solution such as that, that anyone can kind of jump on. So don’t set and forget your website. Make sure you’re A-B testing, you’re messaging, and the whole user journey as well.

13:28.476 All right, thank you very much, Mr. DW. I’ll just call you Mr. DW, not David Weinberger. That’s just a lot of syllables. So we’ve gone over a bunch today. Cleaning your data, investing in email marketing, investing in organic content, and CRO, CRO, customer… Conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization. Lots to take in. Hopefully these tools can help you as a small business owner or, you know, marketer or personal brand as I am kind of get through any sort of downturn in your industry or overall economy. Any last words? Because I think we need to wrap this up very quickly. Thanks for having me. From Podpaste, you’ve listened to content on the go. Again, I’m Darren, and Podpaste hopes you found more insights and tips into your business or brand. If you’ve liked what you heard, please share a link with other businesses or marketers if you think they would get something from this. And for a limited time, we are offering two special services for people. The first is aimed at businesses that have never done podcasting and want to try it out before committing to a full series. Think, try before you buy where we will edit and repurpose a podcast episode into 10 pieces of content for you for only $95. That’s 82% off our normal rate. But if you’ve already have a podcast going, we’d love to edit an episode for free for you or repurpose it into 10 pieces of content to show you what is possible. Either way, sign up at the link in the show notes or YouTube description below to jump on a quick 10-minute discovery call where we can brainstorm ideas or audit your existing podcast and help shape your next series. See you on the next episode.