As businesses strive to regain some sense of post-COVID normalcy, inflation realities and fears of recession threaten to put everyone — especially those in the marketing department — on their back foot. For software companies, however, cutting into productive marketing budgets is exactly the wrong way to survive uncertain economic times. Instead, the C-suite should lean into the curves when it comes to their marketing budget. How? By ensuring that the marketing organization can pick up what demand still exists and prime the organization to accelerate growth as economies rebound.
One of the pandemic’s lessons is that there are silver linings in any difficult situation. Adversity forces clarity of purpose and provides those that listen with an opportunity to get closer to customer needs. It also rewards the well-instrumented marketing budget — businesses who can draw causal effects from activities knowing where best to spend their next dollar, and where a pull back won’t harm the core.
Research shows that the companies who bounced back most strongly from previous recessions usually did not cut their marketing spend, and in many cases increased it. They did, however, change what they were spending their marketing budget on and when they chose to adapt to the changing tides.
