How To Boost Customer Engagement When The Market Is Down - Learn The Secrets of Top Brands

Every brand must now ask themselves if they are equipped to deal with the challenging times ahead — and those who aren’t ready need to take action now. The economic climate means that every second spent on tasks that are not mission critical are a waste of time and resources for any brand. 

This article will give you some tips on how you can boost productivity when the market is down — no matter if you operate a business-to-business brand or direct to consumer brand.

Change The Way You Look at Things

Don’t panic. If you do, it will lead to rash decisions that can negatively impact your brand in the future. Identify whether the market crash is short-term or long-term so you can begin taking action. If it looks like it will be short-lived, you should make plans for the future. Alternatively, if you see a long-term economic downturn, you will have to adjust your plans for longer term pain. Take a calm and methodical approach that enables you to see the bigger picture and get clarity on what really matters to drive your business forward. Survival of your brand in these conditions is paramount. 

Your top priority should be to provide your existing customer base with the best experience possible in order to keep them.  This may also be a time to offer discounts for your long term or higher value customers. The goal here is to keep driving revenue, but also make your brand relevant and attractive for the long-term. You want your customers to remember you as someone who was helpful during difficult times. 

When the economy turns around, your brand will already be poised to take advantage. The market crash can also present an opportunity for your company to grow. As people stop spending money on needless luxury products, they will seek a way to save money. Now is even more important than ever to provide value to your customers by offering great products at affordable prices. Being a responsible company is essential if you want to survive long-term.

“Recessions damage consumer confidence, can damage retailers and suffocate brands who often struggle to make payroll and cover working capital. However, it is important to realize that there can also be substantial opportunities. Brands and retailers that survive a recession may emerge with a more engaged and loyal set of customers, fewer competitors, and additional assets and opportunities.” - Sarah Willersdorf of the Boston Consulting Group told VogueBusiness

Automation and AI

A recession gives you a fantastic opportunity to automate repetitive tasks and streamline things to make more efficient use of your employees’ time. Automating repetitive customer service tasks with knowledge basis, chatbots, and FAQs will enable your CS team to provide a better experience for your customers. Your CS team will also appreciate the fact that they don’t have to deal with the same questions over and over again.   

This goes beyond your customer service team.  Automating repetitive sales and marketing tasks should also be a priority.  You can use sales and marketing automation tools to streamline your sales team’s prospecting efforts.  You can use AI to quickly analyze campaign data and create custom reports or identify issues a human could overlook. Also leverage AI to create targeted marketing campaigns populated with your existing campaign data. Machine learning and artificial neural networks can also be used on the operational side of your business. Doing so will allow you to make accurate predictions and more efficiently manage your operations.

The ultimate goal is that these tools will allow your team to work smarter, faster, and more efficiently than they could before. That means that you can deliver better customer experience, improve customer retention rates and revenues, and create happier employees. 

Video Meetings Instead of Traveling

Facetime is an important way to build your brand and help get business deals done. It provides a level of authenticity and gives a personal connection between both parties. However, a recessionary market will lead some businesses to reduce their spending on travel. Now is the time to take this a step further and actually stop traveling entirely or be highly selective of the costs of trips that are necessary. 

Consider switching to video meetings for one-on-one conversations and webinars when you’re looking to pitch to a group. This is a more efficient way of conducting business and will also allow you to increase the number of meetings if done in conjunction with a proper marketing campaign. You might think that it’s impossible to run a successful business without any in person meetings, but it is more common now than ever considering companies were forced to go remote during covid shut-downs. 

This is also a great time to bring sales and marketing teams together.  A smart, data-driven ad campaign with the target of driving prospective customers to a webinar can have positive ripple effects across the entire sales organization.  It’s a great way to turn prospects into high-intent leads ready to make a purchase. COSLR as an example provides a B2B leads database that can easily be leveraged to send personalized invitations to prospects for your webinar or other sales initiatives.

Be Selective with Your Marketing Budget

If you have any marketing campaigns that are planned then you should be careful with how you allocate budget and to which advertising channels. Review your marketing plan and be selective with where you spend the ad budget. Postpone any campaigns that don’t have a clear ROI, and increase budgets where you can clearly track metrics and have seen positive results historically.  Your goal is to make more money than you send with your ad campaigns so avoid “branding” only campaigns 

Overall, your marketing campaigns will most likely have a lower ROI in the short term, but they will be a lot more efficient in the long-term. In order to be able to survive a market crash, your business needs to be efficient in every possible way. You need to make the best use of your time, money, and resources. You also need to be strategic with your investments so that you can benefit from them in the long term. 

Personalizing and hyper-targeting ad campaigns is now easier than ever before. Jebbit as an example that enables you to capture attributes to build custom audience segments, which has a positive impact on your ad spend and ROI. Most aspects of your digital advertising campaign can be dynamically customized in real-time. This includes geo-targeting, ad copy, audience delivery, and even emails that are sent to the customer. Now is the time to leverage these technologies to improve your ROI. 

Automate or Outsource Repetitive Tasks

As discussed above, any repetitive tasks that are eating up your employees’ time should be automated. Empower your teams to focus on more critical aspects of your business and executing your brand’s mission.  Daily sales reports, marketing campaign data, and even engineering or revenue reports can all be automated and delivered to necessary team members.  Streamlining operations is the quickest way to improve the bottom line and is the reason why Jebbit easily integrates with 35+ apps and tools.

If you aren't able to automate a task, you should consider outsourcing it so that you can focus on what really matters. Everyone can benefit from outsourcing certain tasks, including your most senior executives. When tasks are outsourced, they can be done for much lower cost and in a much shorter time frame. COSLR as an example is a great SaaS tool for sales teams because it's an outsourced “co-seller” which handles the monotonous tasks of finding leads on websites or linkedin, and crafting hundreds of emails for cold outreach to prospects.   

The 80/20 rule has been around for a while and it is one of the most important concepts in business. The most savvy brands understand that 80% of the outcomes come from 20% of the causes. Identifying these causes will enable you to improve your business. Are there certain tasks that a certain employee is constantly doing? What about certain customers? Are there any ways that you can contact these clients less often or with a more personalized and targeted message? 

This is one of the reasons Jebbit offers a no-code builder for its platform.  Launching an interactive editorial should not take someone with an engineering degree.  With a few clicks one person can choose from 50 templates to launch an editorial , trivia, lookbooks, live polling, and more—with speed and control.  

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A recession or short term down market is an unfortunate and unsettling event, but it should also be looked at as an opportunity because it gives your brand the chance to become a better, more efficient business. You are now in a position to make serious changes to your company and to prepare it for a more uncertain future with only a few simple steps. 

1. Change the way you look at things by avoiding panic and taking steps to retain customers and build confidence. 
2. Automation and AI can create efficiencies to boost productivity by enabling your employees to work smarter, and faster than they could before
3. Video meetings and webinars, if done correctly, enable you to lower costs by reducing travel costs while simultaneously casting a wide net to engage with prospects on a personal level. 
4. Be selective with your marketing budget and focus only on advertising channels that have a clear and correlated ROI.
5. Automate or outsource with intelligent tools like COSLR and Jebbit to ensure your teams are spending 20% of their time to drive 80% of an outcome. 

We have seen how a few adjustments and changes can help you boost productivity when the market is down. By changing the way you look at things, automating repetitive tasks, and making select investments, you can create a more efficient business that is prepared for the future.

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