You are grappling with the pressures of marketing budget cuts in your department. Is your first instinct during tough times is to slash marketing spend? That might seem like a quick way to save money. But have you ever questioned the long-term impact of these cuts?
How do companies deal with the aftermath of reduced marketing budgets and the challenge of reestablishing lost momentum? Marketing budget cuts can seem logical when immediate cost savings are needed—but what happens when that momentum is lost? The brand visibility dwindles, and customers move to competitors who maintain their marketing efforts.
How can marketers effectively communicate the value they bring, especially when the common metrics used to justify their existence seem ephemeral or delayed?
That’s exactly what our Social Pulse Podcast: B2B guest, marketing strategist Ardath Albee, explores in the recap of the podcast.
[Listen to the full episode below, or read on for the full transcript. And get started with Agorapulse today with a free trial.]
Ardath has seen firsthand the fallout from marketing budget cuts and has a wealth of actionable strategies to share. Not only does she know how to survive budget cuts, but she also has insights into demonstrating the indispensable value of marketing during these tough times. Ardath is the CEO and B2B marketing strategist for her consulting firm, Marketing Interactions Inc., with extensive experience in digital marketing, marketing consulting, content marketing, and content strategy. Ardath has authored influential books, such as Digital Relevance. She’s also a sought-after speaker known for her direct, insightful advice on marketing challenges.
Why do companies often decide to cut marketing budgets first during tough times?
Ardath Albee: I guess it depends on the company, but for the most part, marketing is still seen as a cost center.
And so when they’re looking at it, we need to reclaim a couple hundred thousand dollars. It’s easy to look at that ad budget or that team member or what have you and think, “Well, not that big a deal. We can work with that because they still need operations. They still need to serve their customers and deliver their products. They need developers to work on their product. They need all of that kind of stuff.”
Marketing is sitting in this no man’s land as an outlier for a lot of companies. And I think that’s what makes it easy. But then, again, anybody who’s been in a marketing position knows that everybody in the company thinks they’re a marketer, and everybody has an opinion and they all think it’s easy. And so they think, “What could be the harm?”
Mike Allton, podcast host: So let’s take that example, [for] somebody who drastically reduces their ad spend, maybe they lay off a marketing ops member, a web designer, or a social media specialist.
What are the long-term consequences for a company that’s taken those kinds of steps to reduce spending?
Ardath Albee: I’m glad you phrased it around long-term because what people fail to realize is that marketing, at least in B2B, has a real-time lag. So when you think about most of my clients are selling complex solutions and their buy cycle is anywhere from eight months to a year or longer, and it takes a long time.
When you’re launching these marketing campaigns and programs and putting content out there, and what have you, the payback from all of that storytelling and sharing and educating doesn’t happen right away. It takes a long time.
And so if you cut marketing today, chances are you’re not going to see much difference right away but a few months down the road when your competitors are out there sharing content and educating and are present and visible.
You are no longer top of mind. You’ve been replaced, and people just think, “Well, they must’ve gone away or something.” And so there’s been research done about this by firms like McKinsey.
What they found was that companies who maintain their marketing presence of programs during a downturn can ramp right back up as soon as the situation changes and buyers come back into play. Those who have not [done so] faced a long road to getting all of that back out there and regenerating that momentum and interest and what have you.
But the other thing, too, is a long-term consequence. Look at the market today and how it’s changed. Buyers don’t want to talk to sellers. Buyers want to self-educate. What happens when you stop self-educating them? They turn to somebody who is going to reach out and call you to do that. They have to perceive that you are less risky than another option. And they also have to be confident in their choice.
Without that continuous engagement with you, your content, your ideas, and that momentum, that’s not going to happen. They’re going to go somewhere else. And so it takes a long time to recover from what looks like we have programs in the can for a couple of months, so it won’t be a big deal if we get rid of marketing for six months.
Mike Allton: As both buyers and consumers, we’ve seen plenty of examples of this, both positive and negative between the pandemic, and then the economic lack of performance over the past couple of years.
There’s just a treasure trove of examples, but I’m wondering from your experience, how everything we’re talking about these cuts, how they typically affect the actual marketing teams themselves, people who are still part of the team, if there’ve been cuts in the team and overall company performance.
Ardath Albee: I was just involved in a situation like that where a client of mine decided to cut most of the teams that I was on, including me, and they left a team of four with one person. And so they lost me. I was in charge of the content strategy, content production, and all that kind of thing for their programs. They lost their graphic design person. They lost their ABM strategist person. And the person left standing is the Marketing Ops person. Because they figured they needed someone to run all the systems. Now, granted, she’s a Swiss army knife type of marketer. She’s worked in agencies and she has a lot of capabilities, but she’s one person, and there are only so many hours in a day.
So on top of that, they then rearranged her and put her under a whole new leader—but [with] the whole new mandate from what we had all been working on before all this happened. And so the disruption is huge and the scramble to reset, and they changed market approach. And of course, there’s no groundwork done for that. No foundation. So it’s a big upset.
But it’s also why you hear so many marketers talking about burnout, and there has to be something better than this. And I’ll tell you what’s interesting to me: You mentioned the pandemic, and during the pandemic, I was overbooked. I had so many clients, I didn’t know what to do.
And I was working around the clock trying to keep up with everything because they all realized how important it was to keep going forward, even during the upset of the pandemic.
Right now, with this market uncertainty, all I’m seeing is layoffs. I’m seeing projects deferred. I’m seeing contracts getting cut. I’m seeing marketers getting laid off. And it makes me sit back and wonder what companies are thinking, and the closest I can get, because a lot of my clients are tech, is that cash is no longer free.
Inflation has changed the way capital flows and the value of cash and everything else, but it makes me think, “Why weren’t we all prepared for this?”
Mike Allton: And to your point, there’s a deep psychological impact that, that serious amount of cuts can have to individuals.
First, you’re talking about a survivor’s guilt, right? Where you’ve got the lone person standing. I’ve seen that time and time again. Everybody else lost their jobs. She’s been shifted around, or he’s been shifted around, but they still have their job, but then there’s a lack of trust.
All of a sudden now they don’t know that they can rely on their company. Because next month it could be a whole new round of cuts, and they could be part of that. So now they’re fearful, and they’re not going to be performing at their best possible level.
If that’s the kind of situation that a company is creating, suppose for a moment that actual decisions for cuts haven’t yet been made in a hypothetical company.
How would marketers go about kind of demonstrating their value—either just to preempt any kind of cut?
Ardath Albee: Yeah, well, I hope they have some runway.
It’s hard to establish marketing value instantly. And so it’s something that I encourage my clients to do as a matter of course, as a matter of marketing operations.
Things that they need to look at are:
- What’s contributing to revenue, to growth, to company objectives?
- What programs are in play that are aligned with the business?
- And how can they show progress toward that?
And so I mentioned before the time lag in marketing, and so what we often need to do is when you have a long buy process, right?
How can you show the momentum that you’re creating in the first stages? How can you show people making progress on understanding the problem-to-solution journey that they’re on?
And that they are actively engaging with the thoughts and point of view you’re sharing and the information and education and that kind of thing. Another thing is how many people, or buyers are reaching out and saying, “Hey, we want to talk to you. Not to marketers, to sales, to your company.” Because the research shows that 75 percent of buyers want a rep-free experience and don’t call us. We’ll call you 80 percent of them. We’re going to call the vendor first. And so can you show an increase in web content request forms?
Can you show that they’re clicking on the contact your sales rep link within the emails you’re sending out? How can you show that you’re activating that intent, right? And so you want to look for things like that. I think a lot of times we look at, “Oh, look at the amount of clicks we got on our emails and things like that.” And those are seen by your executive team as vanity metrics, right? How does that connect to revenue?
And so we need to think about the financial perspective the profit and loss statements. How do we tie what we’re doing to what your CEO said on the annual call about where the company’s going, what objectives it has, whatever, and how do we show that we’re participating in that with a material impact?
We need to take it a step further than I think a lot of marketing teams do. And part of that is the fault of the tech companies because look what they track for you a lot of times is vanity metrics without the ability to extend those into what happens next.
What common mistakes do marketers make when budgets are slashed?
Ardath Albee: Well, I think a lot of it is almost a knee-jerk reaction. And so it’s, like, “Oh my God, we better do something or we’re going to get cut next.” And if we can just get buyers coming through the door, we can shore up sales and show them that, right? They need to bring marketing back and all those kinds of things.
- What we tend to forget is we’re not the ones in control of any of that. It’s the buyer’s timeline. Especially when things are difficult from an economic perspective, especially buyers are pulling back, too. It’s not just your company that’s facing these things. And so I think we tend to panic in our urgency. We think we can put on to our buyers, and that’s not necessarily true. They may be putting the brakes on even harder than your company.
- One of the things we need to think about is how do we dig in for the long haul. How can we be helpful to our buyers who may need to buy our solution but can’t right now because their budgets have been cut? How do we help them think about that? How do we help them position? “The project is a must-have” instead of “Whenever things turn around, we can then do this. How do we help them think about those things?”
This is where it comes down to a lot of the work I do in building personas and understanding buyers and context and things that are important to them. I think from the pandemic on, we have seen buyers change tremendously.
And so not only are we seeing the generational shift from boomers down to millennials becoming decision-makers who are different animals, but we’re seeing so much change.
What’s important to companies? And why are buyers choosing to solve the problems they’re solving? And what are the outcomes that they’re hoping to gain? And are we using the words they use, right? Are we relevant to them? Are we speaking to the context they’re dealing with? And that all shifts during times like this.
I would say one of the first things we could do is do a quick reset, reach out, and talk to some customers, some buyers, and you don’t have to do a formal persona project or whatever, but just get a level set right on where are they now? What’s changed for them? Where see if you can uncover any opportunities. Those kinds of things.
Marketing, Momentum, and Maintaining Both
Mike Allton: Ardath, I mentioned momentum in the introduction.
I’m wondering if you can talk about this concept of marketing, momentum, and why it’s essential to maintain even during a financial strain.
Ardath Albee: The whole point of supporting a buying process is helping people buy.
If we’re not helping them gain momentum, then we’re not helping them buy. Somebody else will be doing that.
Let me give you my definition of momentum, right? When you look at and get to know your buyers, they have a bunch of things they need to learn, know, and understand to keep moving forward. And that’s what you want them to do: continue to take steps in the right direction.
And so when you think about also that buying committee size has expanded, chances are that you aren’t able to reach and engage all of the people involved in the buying committee—nor should you have to. But maybe you’re only able to reach the most involved one or two who are in charge of doing the research and evaluation, maybe three, but we have to enable them to build internal consensus as well.
And so what you want to do, and here’s where I think. We fall on the job sometimes if we don’t run our campaigns or marketing programs lined up from problem to solution. Now, I know that the spaghetti graphic that Gartner shows where the buying process is no longer linear. Great and fine. But still, we have to answer all of their questions, no matter which order they access the answers in our content. We still have to be able to fill in all the gaps they have in their knowledge to help them keep moving forward. We need to provide materials that they can provide to the other people on the buying committee in answer to their questions, which means we need to know what they are, so we can answer them. And when you have all of that working for you, you continuously enable them to take another step forward and to get people on board working towards the solution.
Now, if your campaign cuts off after three touches and a webinar or whatever, and yet they still have seven or eight steps left in the process. What are you going to do? You need to map it out across the entirety of what they need to learn. And then you need to figure out how to connect all that content so they can drive their own momentum. Maybe they only need this piece today, but maybe they’re reading it and they say, “Oh, and this leads to this next thing. Well, what is that about? Let me click on that and figure it out. Oh, yeah. Well, so and so needs to know about this part.” And so they share it with somebody else, but we need to think about what are all the things they need to know.
Here’s the thing: Even though buyers want to self-serve, they don’t know what they don’t know. And so we need to be there to help them figure out what is all that stuff they need to know and share it with them in a way that helps them continue to make progress.
The other thing interesting to me about these longer buying cycles and what have you is they can be moving along just fine. And then all of a sudden it looks like they ghosted you, right? Because they probably already changed, or something happened, and it interrupted their buying process. But, if you keep the momentum going, you keep the outreach going, they’re going to reengage when they get back to it again. And it happens all the time.
And we tend to take it like, “Oh, cross them off. They’re no longer interested.” Not true. Sometimes it takes a long time and other things get in the way. And we forget that buying our solution is not their job. They have a day job. Buying is an addition to that. And so we need to just keep nudging them along and providing information that’s relevant and meaningful to them.
Mike Allton: And to your earlier point, while everyone in the company might think that they’re a marketer, the reality is they’re not marketers. Nobody but marketers is going to be thinking about everything that you just talked about outlining, understanding, talking to customers, getting a solid grip on their journey, whatever that looks like, and making sure that they’ve got all the pieces in place.
Post-Budget Cut Strategies
One thing that you talked to me about in the green room that I want to bring up because it was so appropriate. You talked about how you understand PNL statements and you know how to talk to CFOs and that sort of thing. And a lot of marketers don’t.
That’s a segue to my next question because I want you to talk about the strategies that marketing teams can adopt that might maximize their impact after budget cuts, even when they’ve got limited resources.
But for those of you listening, whose budgets haven’t been cut, I want you to pay close attention. Because if you can learn to operate with less and speak better to the CFO and speak their language, your role, I think, is much more secure.
What’s your take on that?
Ardath Albee: I’m trying to figure out how to combine those two things.
Let’s just set the profit and loss statement aside for right now, and let’s talk about smart strategies with fewer resources. And here’s the thing for me: We’ve talked about the length of buy cycles, right? And we’ve all seen that 95/5 statistic, right? 95 percent of people are not in the market at the same time. Only 5 percent are. So that’s why we need to have continuous content out there and that kind of thing.
What I want you to think about: A lot of our companies have pillar stories, right? There’s three or four stories that are big pillar pieces. Here’s the big problem we solve. And then there’s all the stuff that leads up to it.
We need to think about how we stack our content. So for people who aren’t in the market, can we share smaller ideas on social media to get them thinking about something, the problem, or maybe the impact of the problem, or something like that? And then, if they’re interested, they could click through and read a blog post or watch a video. And then, oh, there’s also a webinar coming up in a month, or you can download the white paper. How does it all work together?
I would argue that in a lot of companies I work with, they have tons of content. Quite frankly, if they would just go talk to their customers and figure out where that content falls short and update that content, they can repurpose, republish, and recombine all kinds of content that they have. And so, a lot of times we’re reinventing the wheel, saying, “Oh, we need a new campaign. So we need these new assets and we need this new stuff.” And instead, what we need to think about is what’s that continuous story. What are all the pieces of it?
When you think about it that way, you can slot in a new piece where a new question has come up or whatever. And you’re not reinventing the wheel, but you’re able to create content that is essentially evergreen, addressing contextual issues relevant to your buyer, and then maybe you update it once a year or every two years or whatever because statistics change or perceptions change or what have you.
But I would argue that a lot of us have a lot of content. We could spend a minimum amount of time improving and relaunching and reorganizing it right and figure out a linking strategy to connect the dots and maybe only create one new piece that serves as an umbrella around this new collection you just created. Which is why I said the first thing everybody should do is pick up the phone and talk to their customers just to find out where are we missing and where are the gaps. And now, if you go back to the profit and loss stuff, we need to figure out what can we talk about with our executive team that shows that we are aligned and contributing to them meeting the objectives that they’ve set for the company.
And so that means we’ve got to look past those vanity metrics and look at what are ways we can talk about the programs that we’re running and the things that we’re doing that show that they can impact and are impacting those objectives that your executive team set forward. It may mean we have to figure out a new way to collect metrics, or it may mean we just need to take a new perspective on it.
But the other thing I think marketers miss out a lot on is alignment with sales.
Sales can be a megaphone for marketing if we’re helping them have better conversations and all of those kinds of things. And the MQLs that we’re sending them are good and want to speak to them because we’ve figured out how to not score by, wow, they engaged with three random things. Let’s send them to sales.
But they’ve engaged with 75 percent of this problem-to-solution story. So here’s how you do outreach to them. Here’s the next piece you can provide them to get in this call. And that starts working sales and marketing together, enabling each other is huge, especially in an environment where sellers or buyers have said they want a sales rep-free experience because they’re convinced sellers aren’t helpful.
Helping your sellers become helpful can change a lot
Mike Allton: As the chief storyteller at Agorapulse, I appreciate everything you’re talking about in terms of identifying those stories, those core stories, making sure that they’re being told one of the things we’re trying to do at Agorapulse: Stop counting how many campaigns we create per quarter and instead be focusing on what I’ve dubbed as flywheels, where initially it was a campaign, but once it’s launched, we’re not going to just move on to the next campaign. We’re going to continue to optimize and distribute into your point repurpose.
And here’s where I can connect that dot between this kind of work and the PNL statement—because if we can figure out how to track the entire journey and the outcomes, not just the output, but the outcomes of these campaigns/flywheels if we’re not creating 16 more campaigns every single quarter, then we’re not trying to reinvent those wheels every single quarter. We do it once, and we optimize it, and we get that working, and we’re reducing costs, and we’re demonstrating value at the entire time.
Ardath Albee: That’s the key because I have clients who have been running the same programs that I helped them create for like four years, and they just go out and keep optimizing, right?
And because we’ve created the content and storyline around evergreen topics, these things are true of anybody trying to solve this problem is still relevant, and they just keep updating and refining it based on the engagement levels and what have you. Every once in a while, we pull out one piece and replace it with something new. Because it’s lost its relevance, right? Something changed in the market, but they’re using the same program. So they’re not in this constant build it, build it, build it kind of thing. They’re now refining and optimizing to get further benefit from it. Makes a big difference, especially when your resources get cut.
How do you recommend that marketing teams collaborate maybe with some other departments to help the entire company understand marketing’s value?
Ardath Albee: I’m not sure how you market without talking to the rest of the company, quite frankly. And so, I mean, when I go out to build personas, the first thing I want to talk to the marketing team first, but I want to talk to sales. I want to figure out what they need. Who are they talking to? What do they think is important, etc?
Then I want to go talk to the product people. What’s coming down the pipe? What are the new features that you’re working on? And what are you seeing from a usage perspective? And this and that.
Talk to customer success and the whole thing about it is marketing often launches programs without the rest of the company knowing about them or being on board with them or contributing to them.
Marketing has this big opportunity to become an umbrella over go-to-market.
We need to talk to customer success because they’re talking to our customers and working with them and helping them get value after they buy. And for those of you who don’t know your persona for customer retention, expansion, etc is different than the customer who originally buys your product. Because I already have your product, they solved that problem. So now what do these people want?
We need to talk to customer success. We need to talk to customers, but when we talk to products and we can figure out why they’re thinking the way they’re thinking and where we’re going with the product, it helps us foreshadow the story of what’s coming next, right? And with sales, we’re all working towards the same goal, but how can we better enable them? I’ve worked with companies where I’ll go in, and I’ll ask sellers, what are you using from a content perspective with the prospects you’re talking to? They’ll pull up some rusty old PowerPoint from five years ago and say, “Yeah, this one works.” And it’s like, “Oh my God, that was four versions of messaging ago. And they’re like, ‘Well, this works well.'”
And we haven’t seen anything else from marketing that works, or we don’t know how to use it because, quite frankly, sellers are not going to read your content. You got to give them the cheat sheet and the key messages. Here are the questions you can ask a buyer who’s read this. And here’s what the next offer could be. “Well, if you’ve read that, you’re going to find this interesting or whatever.” You have to give it to them and explain it to them in ways they can use it and give them, “I write a templated email and say, ‘Insert your thing here, whatever, but here’s how you can talk about this.'” Those kinds of things. And it helps sellers get value and use the current content, not the stuff that they’re used to talking about that they keep on their laptops somewhere. And you haven’t seen it for six years, and they’ve also changed it and updated it on their own. Now we have cross-messaging everywhere. Terrible.
Tech and AI
I’m wondering what role you see technology and AI in particular playing when it comes to helping marketing teams, particularly if they’re facing budget cuts and the kinds of things we’ve been talking about today.
Ardath Albee: Well, I think there’s a lot of ways AI can help, but here’s the biggest thing I’ll never forget:
It was a few months back, and Andy Crestodina called me. He said to me, “All right, I’m using AI to build personas. I want to talk to you.”
And I said, “No, you don’t want to talk to me.”
And he said, “Yeah, I do.” So we got on a call, and he showed me what he was doing, and he was sharing his screen. He’s going through this.
And all I could say to him was, “Andy, where did that come from? How do you know that it’s pulling information that’s relevant to your particular buyer, right? Or whoever the buyer is, right?”
He was just doing this as an exercise. And I said, “How do you know when it’s not telling you the truth? Where did it come from?”
(I say this just to give you a reference point. I have built a gazillion directors of IT personas. No two are the same because of the problem they’re solving, the type of product it is, what vertical industry they’re in, whatever. What size company there are all kinds of differences, right? So they’re never the same.)
And so I’m kind of like, “Andy, when you ask AI to build you this persona, how do you know if it’s true?”
And so I came up with this concept called a buyer MVP. And MVP stands for Minimum Viable Persona. And instead of doing a full-blown persona project, you do three to five interviews with buyers, and customers who could be representative of that persona just to set a baseline, right? You can get the important key factors down. And then when you ask, you have a better way to prompt the AI.
Number two: You have a way to call it on its BS, right? Know when it’s hallucinating or know it’s telling you something that doesn’t feel quite right because you have something to reference and quite frankly, the ability to better prompt it and set it up and the ability for you to know, “Should you believe it or not?” is huge.
All these people are saying things about AI, like, well, it will make so so writers, great writers. How will they know? If they aren’t great writer and they don’t know what great writing is, how will they know, right? It will look good to them. And it’ll be a lot easier than facing that blank page and writing it themselves.
But how will they know it’s quality content? And so you need to create these kinds of cheat sheets, if you will, that help you understand, like the top things that we want to talk about about this subject or topic or problem or question or whatever. Use that as inputs for the AI. It needs guidance. There needs to be a human in the loop. The human has to be smart enough to know when to call AI on its stuff.
And so that’s one of the key things for me: How do we keep AI honest?
And for me, I will say I prefer to write from scratch because I’ve tried to edit what AI has given me, and it takes me longer to do that than it does to just write from scratch. But it’s getting better—but so far, not good enough.
Mike Allton: I love that perspective. I love Andy. I had Crestodina on my own podcast, the AI Marketing Impact podcast. We were talking there, not about personas, but about identifying content gaps for which AI is remarkably good. It can look at a spreadsheet of 1,000 pieces of content on your website and say, “You know what? You haven’t talked about these eight pieces of topics.”
I love your point about creating at least a baseline profile for who you want to talk to before you even start to talk to machines about your target audience. So thank you for sharing that. You’ve been amazing. This has been such a fun and insightful interview for folks who want to know more.
Thank you for joining another episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, where each and every week we’re talking to marketing professionals like you, going through many of the same struggles you’re going through and sharing their stories. Subscribe to find in each episode, the inspiration, motivation, and perspiration that go into growing and scaling businesses like yours, hosted by Mike Allton and powered by Agorapulse, the leading social media management solution.
Learn more at agorapulse.com. If you found value in today’s episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast player and leave us a review. We value your feedback and look forward to bringing you more useful insights.
