Digital Marketing Tactics For Uncertain Times

After a slower than expected holiday season in 2022, many retailers are cutting budgets in 2023.

While optimizing budgets makes sense during times of financial uncertainty, these times offer savvy marketers easy ways to improve their market position. According to a study by Analytical Partners, 63% of marketers who increased their marketing investments during the 2008 financial crisis experienced a positive return on investment. Additionally, those who increased their media investments saw an increase in add-on sales of 17%.

And in tough economic times, growth costs less when everyone invests heavily in marketing.

Where should digital retailers focus their investments? Here are some marketing strategies to help your marketing profitably during this challenging year:

1. Switch to DSP for retargeting – Marketing strategists have proven that retaining an existing user is at least five times cheaper than attracting a new user. This is why retargeting, a marketing strategy to re-engage existing users, is all the more important, especially in times of economic volatility. And as privacy changes from Apple and Google make retargeting on social channels more difficult, marketers are turning to demand-side platforms (DSPs) to launch retargeting campaigns using their own data.

   Based on internal first-party data about inactive customers, retailers can approach a DSP to leverage that data and enable advertising campaigns to retarget those inactive/inactive customers. Using advanced DSP technology and inactive retailer user data, campaigns can be targeted to similar users, many of whom may be inactive users of that retailer. Using user data from inactive users, retailers can create personalized, triggered advertising campaigns to connect key user exit stages and drive customers back to using their app.

2. Invest in video Andrew Frank, vice president and analyst at renowned technology research and advisory firm Gartner, recommends video advertising as a manageable, less volatile ad format to drive traffic and awareness. And the recommendation makes sense, as research by videographer Wyzowl found that 73% of consumers would rather watch a video to learn more about a product or service.

   In 2023, vertical videos on Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts are trending. According to data from social media management platform Hootsuite, Reel is growing rapidly and Instagram has more than 2 billion monthly users. It's the best app for 16-24 year olds (it even beats TikTok). Speaking of TikTok, the app is expected to continue its growth trajectory in 2023 with new features including Photo Mode (carousel), TikTok Stories (cloned from Instagram Stories) and a new search feature. And the short YouTube channel reached the milestone of 50 billion daily views in Q4 2022, up from 30 billion daily views in Q1 2022. TikTok creators are expressing dissatisfaction with the paid creator platform, YouTube's new revenue sharing program YouTube as a video marketing platform only strengthen as competition among social video companies increases in 2023.

3. Make sure it's measurable – Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is still important for retailers, but it's becoming increasingly important for businesses in times of uncertainty. Because of this, marketers need accurate KPI measurement systems to determine the results of their marketing inputs.

The key performance indicators that allow traders to control their costs are indicators related to business outcomes. You are connected:

• Unique audience and product earnings by campaign or media source : Identify which media sources/campaigns are profitable and which are not.
• Average Order Value : Another key business metric to understand order size and compare it to acquisition cost
• Return rate : Returns can be very expensive for e-commerce businesses. Sales influence other metrics like brand loyalty, customer satisfaction, and maybe even product quality. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the yield to ensure that it remains stable and affordable.
• Payback Time for Customer Acquisition : During times of economic uncertainty, it's important to understand how long it will take to recoup your customer acquisition costs. It can transform the procurement process to more effectively measure costs and ensure a focus on customer lifetime value and profitability.

4. Brand Performance – In tough times there is a tendency to abandon brand promotion in favor of performance. Instead, marketers need to strike a balance between brand campaigns and performance campaigns while ensuring brand campaigns include measurable recommendations. We call this approach BrandFormance, which integrates brand and performance marketing as part of an integrated KPI-based marketing approach. This ensures that during tough economic times, the retailer optimizes their marketing spend to ensure brand metrics like reach and recall are met. Ultimately, retailers can only achieve their KPIs when brand and performance marketing are aligned. And in times of economic uncertainty, there are opportunities to gain market share from competitors who are rapidly cutting their budgets. That is why brand performance is particularly important in the current economic environment.

5. Use AI to improve performance – Unless you've just lived under the same roof, you know all the hype surrounding ChatGPT. While artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been used in marketing for years, ChatGPT has turned AI into something you can even discuss with your grandmother. Given the popularity of ChatGPT, there is no excuse for marketers not to use the available AI technology to improve their marketing campaigns.

Rather than replacing marketers, we believe AI is a tool that can act as an ally for marketers, enabling the analysis of millions of marketing campaign data points to uncover actionable insights that automatically improve campaign effectiveness. For example, one e-commerce client saw a significant increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) by using our AI technology. For this client, AI Marketing Platform optimized ad creative by creating the best performing ads for each target segment on each platform/channel. Optimal campaign performance was achieved because AI technology selected the best images, colors, fonts and text from the offering in a way that a human creative director could not. AI technology determines when ads are updated to ensure consistent and optimal ROAS.

Two good things about tough economic times are: (1) they force us to be smarter marketers, and (2) they don't last forever. As you prepare your marketing for 2024 and beyond, it's time to get smarter to ensure you hit your KPIs.

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David Itkowitz is Chief Performance Officer at Zoomd , a provider of mobile user acquisition and research solutions for publisher websites

Marketing strategies that work even in times of uncertainty