How are marketers pivoting during challenging times?

As the Customer Success lead at BlueOcean, I have had a lot of honest conversations lately with marketers looking for lessons on what they can do to adeptly react to these challenging economic times.

Our core function in Customer Success is to act as an extension of our clients’ marketing teams – providing expert recommendations to help maximize available resources, and we’re starting to see some trends across our customers’ experiences.

During a recent meeting our customer shared with our team how overwhelmed her Marketing organization is right now: pressure to grow the business and produce MQLs with far fewer team members and less budget to do so. Expectations continue to grow and resources continue to shrink. We have been there – either as marketing practitioners or agency leaders ourselves!

This conversation triggered a deep conversation within our team.  How do customers successfully meet these challenging times and decide where to cut back or where to pivot?

Here are a just a few ways that BlueOcean customers are pivoting:

• With paid media budget cuts, now is a great time to assess and refine your messaging to ensure it’s working as hard as possible.  Dig deeper into how your brand is showing up in core category conversations and determine if you have clear messages that are resonating with your audiences.  This can improve website performance in terms of organic traffic, as well as the conversion of continued paid investments through copy and content improvements. Optimizing your messaging and content can be a big game changer when paid media investments decrease. 
• Optimize organic social media by looking deeply at audience engagement and promotion of your social posts. How can you share more high-quality content with your audience so that they engage and promote at a higher rate and support SOV? How can your team improve messaging cadence and consistent use of a focused editorial calendar?   Your content marketing strategy is a great place to start. 
• Assess audience sentiment and consider campaigns to solicit reviews from customers.  Many of our customers are prioritizing this low-lift tactic and deploying quarterly review campaigns, which can help increase visibility for your product among prospective customers in the research and evaluation phases.

What we know for sure: you can’t do everything at once, even with the best resources!  Knowing where to start, what to stop, and what to continue requires always-on holistic data and insights. Our advice to our customers is to always start with the data in Brand Navigator to assess “what can you do differently instead of do more?”

We know marketers are facing a lot of challenges right now.  We would love to hear from you, and talk about what’s keeping you up at night.  If you’re a BlueOcean customer, reach out to your customer success manager, and if you’re new here, set up a quick touch base to talk about:

• Focus areas/initiatives for your team 
• Biggest challenges/resource constraints
• Upcoming brand/product launch planning cycle milestones

In the meantime, visit our resource center, for more content that might be helpful as you lead your marketing teams through these challenging times. We are honored to navigate these uncharted waters alongside you.