A recession can also be a chance to meet a wholly new set of market opportunities. After all, while consumers are going to want savings, merchants will want more control over their marketing dollars, and anyone who can deliver those may not only survive, but possibly grow. For example, there are recession proof niches, such as coupons affiliates.

Of course, not everyone’s business model is primarily about offering savings. Fortunately, there are a number of marketing strategies you can pursue to help recession-proof your ecommerce business, and they’re all about focusing on the opportunity that a recession represents. These opportunities, moreover, are about (1) offering value to consumers, and (2) generating tangible results from your efforts. After all, results are what ROI in a recession is all about. As the CMA blog points out:

Past recessions have shown that marketers who have taken the approach of “going through this together” with their customers have been more successful at maintaining share and revenue during a recession than their competition. Not surprisingly, value driven brands tend to do better than brands positioned as premium.

[…] The pressure for proven returns on marketing expenditures will increase. Marketers are likely to take a shorter term approach to advertising investments.

This, of course, begs the question of how can you focus on immediate results. Well, the CMA outlines seven different tactics.

  1. Deeper, more frequent customer research: understand how consumers are redefining value.
  2. Maintain marketing spending: there may be an opportunity where your competitors are cutting back.
  3. Adjust product portfolios: consumers will be looking for more value, so focus more on reliability, durability, safety and performance and less on gimmicks.
  4. Stress market share: if you do have room to cut pricing, doing so may help you capture the market share of competitors.
  5. Support your distributors: by securing a reliable supply, you’ll be able to more proactively determine your pricing and manage your market share.
  6. Retain core values: demonstrate how the company is working to cut expenses and not quality
  7. Strategic pricing tactics: determine whether you have room for more price promotions or other customer incentives, such as quantity discounts previously reserved for your best customers.

Now, the original post goes into much more detail on each of these points. So if any one of them have caught your eye (and most of them should have), you should probably go check it out.

More importantly, though, consider how compatible affiliate marketing is with these strategies. It allows you to maintain marketing spend, but keep a focus on generating actual results. This means that merchants who maintain their affiliate marketing strategy are going to be able to capture market share that their competitors cede, and the affiliates who help them do so are going to be able to earn commissions throughout an economic rut.

Merchants, then, should be considering affiliate marketing. And affiliates should be looking into merchants who are demonstrating a proactive approach to marketing.

Read the rest here:
7 Recession Marketing Tips

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