B2B marketing during a recession

As reces­sion looms, B2B mar­keters are putting their bud­gets under the micro­scope. How can they nav­i­gate the economy’s trou­bled waters to main­tain sales and take advan­tage of the upturn when it arrives?

“B2B mar­keters shouldn’t be plan­ning for busi­ness as usu­al over the com­ing year,” says Lisa Nakano, vice-pres­i­dent and research direc­tor at research and advi­so­ry firm For­rester. “With tur­bu­lence in the econ­o­my, they need to think beyond mak­ing mod­est spend­ing increas­es and focus mar­ket­ing bud­gets on key areas of invest­ment while weed­ing out poor­ly per­form­ing activ­i­ties.”

Forrester’s Plan­ning Guide 2023 for mar­keters in demand and account-based mar­ket­ing (ABM) – those sell­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices to busi­ness­es – advis­es B2B mar­keters to boost rev­enues from exist­ing cus­tomers, grow their audi­ences and sharp­en up the impact of their con­tent. The firm also believes this is a good time to exper­i­ment with new tech­nol­o­gy and process­es to find effec­tive ways of get­ting the most out of the mar­ket­ing bud­get.

“Cross-sell­ing to exist­ing clients and upselling them more prod­ucts is clas­sic reces­sion­ary behav­iour and should be pur­sued with vigour. Cus­tomers are unlike­ly to bring on new ven­dors dur­ing times of cri­sis, so B2B mar­keters can find ways to move them through the sales fun­nel by offer­ing them more of their prod­ucts and increas­ing their usage. This will go some way to make up for a lack of new busi­ness,” says Nakano.

When times get tough, it is vital for B2B mar­keters to engage strong­ly with the all-impor­tant deci­sion-mak­ers who will sign on the dot­ted line for their prod­ucts. For­rester notes that B2B buy­ers have become more pro­tec­tive of their pri­va­cy and less like­ly to give out con­tact infor­ma­tion. To over­come this, demand and ABM mar­keters should invest in tech­nol­o­gy that allows them to con­nect with those key con­tacts while hon­our­ing their anonymi­ty.

“This is a time to try out solu­tions such as advanced web ana­lyt­ics, work­ing with data providers, deploy­ing cus­tomer data plat­forms, and try­ing data uni­fi­ca­tion appli­ca­tions. Few­er than one in four mar­keters say they are using solu­tions such as these today to help them reach and engage the grow­ing num­ber of buy­ers who are wait­ing longer to reveal their iden­ti­ties,” says Steven Casey, vice-pres­i­dent and research direc­tor in the For­rester Deci­sions for Demand and ABM Ser­vice.

When the econ­o­my con­tracts, an easy win for B2B mar­ket­ing is to improve the deliv­ery of con­tent. To suc­ceed in 2023, organ­i­sa­tions will need to make their con­tent more acces­si­ble and eas­i­er to digest. Some 73% of organ­i­sa­tions say that con­tent is often too hard to adapt and cus­tomise, accord­ing to Forrester’s 2022 B2B State of Con­tent sur­vey.

Using the right tech­nol­o­gy, mar­keters can cre­ate a mod­u­lar approach to con­tent so it can be bro­ken into chunks and deployed in dif­fer­ent ways along the buy­ing jour­ney and at the most effec­tive points in the cus­tomer life cycle. Focus­ing on the con­tent engine, mar­keters should improve meta­da­ta and auto­mat­ed tag­ging to make it eas­i­er for prospects to find rel­e­vant con­tent. They should also make use of sense-and-respond capa­bil­i­ties, using AI and automa­tion to assem­ble con­tent mod­ules and orches­trate expe­ri­ences, and to pro­vide the ana­lyt­ics and per­for­mance data need­ed to improve the con­text in which they find the con­tent.

Mean­while, an area of poten­tial sav­ings is scal­ing back in-per­son live events in favour of dig­i­tal or hybrid. “While the largest com­pa­nies may feel it’s still vital to keep invit­ing prospects to spend time with their thought lead­ers, small­er busi­ness­es may choose to run events focus­ing only on the key accounts, rather than extend­ing a gen­er­al invi­ta­tion. Run­ning vir­tu­al mar­ket­ing events stands to bring deep sav­ings,” says Nakano.

Sav­ings can also be made by weed­ing out under­per­form­ing activ­i­ties. Accord­ing to Forrester’s 2022 State Of ABM Sur­vey, 26% of ini­tia­tives are ABM in name only and do not fol­low best prac­tice. For­rester advis­es mar­keters to start by improv­ing the low­est per­form­ing 20% of ABM pro­grammes – or drop­ping them alto­geth­er — and grad­u­al­ly work up to analysing those that are rev­enue gen­er­at­ing but under­per­form­ing.

Over­all, says Casey: “At For­rester, we are strong believ­ers that by invest­ing in mar­ket­ing strate­gi­cal­ly dur­ing a dif­fi­cult time like this, it can set you up well to min­imise any shrink­age should it occur in your busi­ness. You will then be well posi­tioned to grow once things turn around.”

For more infor­ma­tion vis­it forrester.com/bold/planning-guides

Pro­mot­ed by For­rester