During uncertain economic times, one of the first budgets to be reduced or cut by a large number of companies is the marketing budget. While there is some logic in doing this — especially when consumers have less disposable income to spend — what often goes overlooked is the opportunity to get ahead of the competition by strategically adjusting your marketing budget during a crisis while they’re cutting costs. If you’re cutting your budget as much or more than your competitors are, you’re bound to at best maintain your market share, but you may end up losing ground overall.

SEO Rankings Should Guide How to Adjust Your Marketing Budget

If you’re working with an SEO agency, a reduction in budget generally means a reduction in the amount of work they’re doing to grow or maintain your rankings for important search terms that drive the bulk of your web traffic. Front page rankings for competitive search terms can be difficult to achieve — and even harder to gain back once they’re lost. So, when considering changes to your marketing budget, consider how far down you’re willing to let yourself slip in Google rankings. If the answer is, “not at all,” then you’ll want to be careful when considering your SEO budget.

Instead of cutting or reducing that SEO budget, consider spending less on social ads or other PPC campaigns. Those paid ads are relatively easy to manipulate in the sense that they can be ramped up or scaled back over time, so there’s more room for flexibility. Likewise, your return on investment for SEO spending is more of a long-term process; if you’re not expecting great results in the immediate future, reducing budgets for paid ads (which have a goal of more immediate results) makes more sense.

Consequences of Reduced PPC Marketing Budget

Going along with the above point, if you’re considering reducing spending on Google Ads campaigns, it’s important not to stop entirely. Doing so can throw off Google’s machine learning ability — the longer a campaign runs consistently, the more data Google has to work with and determine quality score and ad rank. If you pause all together, starting back up can be very much like starting from scratch, as if you’d never run ads previously. There are budget efficiencies to keeping a PPC campaign continuously running with positive results. So, when considering how to adjust your marketing budget, bear in mind that slashing PPC from the mix entirely may negatively affect campaign performance when you’re ready to start back up.

Adjust Your Marketing Budget To Get Ahead

If you have some disposable cash reserves at this time, now is a perfect opportunity to get ahead of the competition. By increasing your marketing budget while others are cutting theirs, you’ll not only survive an economic crisis, but come out of it stronger than ever before. You can work harder to increase search rankings, make your PPC campaigns more efficient, and stay top of mind for your target audience while others fall off the map. Though return on investment is always a priority, changing your perspective to a longer-term view is wise during a time like a global pandemic where businesses in all industries are being hit hard by reductions in consumer spending. But, like every crisis prior to this one, this too shall pass, and you’ll want to be in the best position possible when it does.

Speak With an Expert

Dreamscape Marketing has helped clients navigate multiple economic crises in our 15+ year history. For more information on how to leverage a crisis to get ahead of the competition, or for advice on how to strategically adjust your marketing budget, contact us online or call 888.307.7304 to speak with an expert today!