Are you going to cut your marketing budget or are you going to go for it?
Since the corona virus turned most of our private and professional lives upside down, I've had many discussions with customers about the use of the marketing budget, and often specifically the advertising budget.
In the beginning, I was clear that it's smart to cut down on marketing activities completely.
I'm not so sure about that anymore.
We can now see that visits to websites, social media and - of course - online newspapers have risen sharply during this period. Visits to Gasta 's pages have grown by 18% in the last two weeks, and we have only worked with search engine optimization on the pages. We see that a business community in home office mode is surprisingly quickly finding its form.
In a survey carried out by ANFO, 58% of Norwegian companies say that they are now cutting their marketing investments, while 37% say that they will not do so.
But what is smart?
There's actually a simple answer to that.
Marketing in times of crisis is one of the most researched topics in marketing.
Many research projects come to exactly the same conclusion as, for example, McGraw-Hill Research reached after the crisis in the early 1980s. They studied 600 companies and concluded that the companies that managed to maintain, or had a smaller reduction in the advertising budget than their competitors, experienced the greatest growth when the good times returned.
Those who managed to keep the pressure up could show growth of 275% over the next five years, while those who cut back experienced growth of 12% in the same period.
That's probably why marketing guru Jay Lipe has "Thou shalt not cut marketing spending during slow times" as one of his "10 Commandments of Marketing"!
"The companies that managed to maintain, or had a smaller reduction in their advertising budget than their competitors, experienced the greatest growth when the good times returned."
What should you do?
"The situation we're currently in is completely unique, so this is probably a time when we should take a little more time before taking action. Stunt-based advertising, often with the use of humor, is easily perceived as unsupportive in a difficult time for many.
For those companies that have closed down completely, the answer is nonetheless clear: postpone investment and reduce the marketing budget.
But we also know that many people work from home, are laid off, and have the time and desire to read up professionally. So it's time to create good articles on the website. Perhaps it's also a good idea to review old articles you've written, adjust and republish them.
We at Gasta have chosen to run the same budget on our Google Ads campaigns, and we are also considering several measures to ensure our competitiveness.
All types of marketing activities that show the company's social responsibility are also positive. A good example of this is VisitNorway's latest film, which you can see below.
Would I like to go on vacation in our wonderful country? Oh yes!
Will I be happy until all this is over? You bet!
