Is Your Marketing Technology Ready for a Recession?

Today, brands are keeping a wary eye on the economy, watching the effects of inflation, rising interest rates, Russia’s war on Ukraine, China’s strict two-month lockdown and the impact on global supply chains.

With a slowing economy and concerns about a potential recession, our conversations with clients reveal brands’ urgency to do more with less. They are seeking marketing efficiencies that will position them to weather the current market volatility and any further economic downturn. 

This involves managing costs, reducing waste, and boosting efficiency and effectiveness across every marketing touchpoint from studio to sourcing. However, it’s a daunting mission without interoperable technology that supports the end-to-end marketing lifecycle. 

As you seek to increase the value of marketing activities, consider the ways technology can help you overcome these five common challenges:

You know how it goes. With your brand creating copious amounts of content each year - across markets, cities, and teams - people go rogue, even unintentionally. They engage their own designers and printers, resulting in inconsistencies of colour, logo representation, and off-brand images. And no single person can keep eyes on everything. 

However, you can make it easier for people to get it right with an effective centralised digital asset management (DAM) system. It provides content visibility across internal and external stakeholders and enables asset distribution at speed and scale. 

A cloud-based, self-serve DAM with approved brand assets reduces underutilisation of content, duplication of effort, and inappropriate version management through rich search and retrieval functionality, and rights and user management. You can easily search for and share files across markets and agencies, manage stakeholder access, ensure brand compliance, and maximise asset usage.

Are you relying too heavily on multiple designers, copywriters, and other creatives across distributed markets and teams? If so, content adaptation is costing you time and money. 

Automation technology provides effortless adaptation at scale, accelerating production and delivery across markets. Editable print, digital, and video templates have automated version control and customisable constraints, such as font, colour, and logo. This enables any user to adapt and export on-brand multimedia content in minutes, reducing cost and empowering local markets. 

Ideally, choose software that routes assets directly to your DAM for access and distribution.

To further ensure that every campaign in every market is brand compliant, consider a technology solution that centralises brand toolkits in a self-serve multi-media publishing tool. This helps you create, publish, and distribute brand-compliant content that’s recognisable across markets.  

It’s easy to assume you know which content will perform best. But audience preferences can surprise even the most seasoned professional, especially when the economy is more unpredictable. Intuition alone won’t adequately equip you to boost marketing performance. Without data-led insight about audience engagement, you’ll lack the resources to make informed decisions. 

A marketing analytics platform identifies production trends and opportunities, measures campaign efficiency, and improves ROI from content production. With aggregated performance data across the full campaign lifecycle, you can see how assets are being used by whom in various markets.

At the risk of stating the obvious, administrative aspects of campaign management reduce capacity for higher-value activities. While work management and project management are still rife with unnecessary spreadsheets and emails, nearly everyone in the industry uses some form of technology (at least in part) to address this challenge. But while it may have served its purpose when you onboarded your work management solution, now may be the time to assess whether your current platform performs at a level that will adequately help you achieve your goals. 

A best-in-class work management tool enables effective workflow oversight and addresses structural inefficiencies in moving from campaign ideation to mass deployment in the market. Dashboards provide visibility across multiple campaigns and facilitate easy campaign briefing, budget management, and creative approval. This speeds time to market, reduces waste, and mitigates risk.

With the right technology supporting your marketing operations, you’ll be better positioned to weather further economic turbulence with reduced costs, decreased waste, and increased effectiveness throughout the marketing lifecycle.