3 strategies for marketing in a recession
Do's and don't for hard times
Hello friends,
Amelia here. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little frazzled by all this recession talk. I’m an optimist (by choice), but I don’t like to ignore reality.
What Meg and I have seen over the last year or so is a gradual tightening of the purse strings among climate tech companies.
It seemed as though mainstream tech was hit first, and hardest — and though climate tech held on a little longer (likely thanks to some decent early funding rounds), the world of venture capital and startups has slid into a silent recession, bringing climate tech along with it.
If you’re a climate tech marketer, you know what we’re talking about.
Things are tight right now, whether we’re officially using the ‘R’ word or not.
So Meg and I have been thinking about what it means to survive tough times in the market, and how marketers should approach lean seasons.
Let’s get into it.
1 — Play offense
The stop-start marketing cycle is a death trap for startups under any market conditions. In the next few years, many of your competitors will either disappear or shrink to a skeleton force. In the process, they’ll probably stop much of their marketing activity.
What a goldmine for consistent marketers. By simply keeping your existing content machine running, you’re capturing even more eyeballs and becoming a louder voice, because the others have gone silent.
What this looks like in practice: Keep your blog, newsletter, and socials active. Keep PPC campaigns running (and watch as CPCs slowly fall). Get your leadership team all over LinkedIn. Establish their voices now and you’ll capture massive attention. Trust us — virtually no one is doing this properly today. The opportunity is enormous.
2 — Lean = more targeted
Tough times may well require smaller budgets, but simply spreading your smaller budget across as many channels and audiences as before is a loser’s game. Whether you’re making budget cuts or not, going ‘lean’ should entail doubling down on key audiences. Forget about reaching as many as possible and focus more on frequent touch points with the core audience you know you’ve achieved product-market fit with.
What this looks like in practice: Ditch channels and approaches that aren’t working for you. Run highly targeted paid LinkedIn campaigns; publish niche content marketing assets that speak directly to the target audience (including gated case studies — get some paid distribution behind these!).
3 — Collaborate
Stretch your marketing budget further by collaborating with adjacent brands and organizations. Co-hosting webinars or co-writing reports is a great way to get even more eyeballs leads for half the price while improving your credibility in the market. And content is just one way you can leverage these strategic partners to generate more revenue — I’m sure you’ve already thought of plenty more.
What this looks like in practice: Reach out to friendly brands in your vertical (likely those without directly competing products), relevant scientific or industry organizations, climate-ambitious customers, or whoever you can think of. Pitch collaborations that can result in re-purposable content (e.g. a webinar that becomes a report, which becomes multiple blog posts and a social media campaign). Split costs 50/50 (or offer to cover it if you’re trying to get them on board).
Takeaways
It looks like we’re on the cusp of some major consolidation in climate tech. All markets eventually move in the direction of monopolies, and each of the verticals within climate tech will be no exception to this rule. A recession, whether it hits us or not, will probably just accelerate this process.
As marketers, we can’t control everything — only how we do our jobs. The best way to stay in the game for the long term (or appear highly attractive as an acquisition) is to actually stay in there — keep posting, keep learning about your audience, keep refining and doubling down on what works.