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A storm is brewing on the horizon as we approach the end of the year: the recession is on the horizon.
After hearing confirmation that UK GDP shrank in Q3 2022, many organisations have braced themselves. While some businesses have had to rethink their hiring strategies by slowing down recruitment to lower-than-expected levels, others have had to make layoffs in order to cut costs.
It’s well known that marketing is typically one of the first business units that get hit in a recession. Consequently, it’s more important than ever for marketing teams to demonstrate their value to the business.
Marketing leaders need to put together a plan that shows how their team can help weather the storm by becoming leaner, meaner and more efficient to survive. This needs to happen all while navigating the existing global talent shortage that has reached a 16-year high.
- More than 3 in 4 (78%) employers report difficulty finding the talent they need.
- 75% of marketers say the pandemic has permanently shifted how they collaborate and communicate at work.
So, how can marketing leaders reconcile the need for talent with the reality of the current economic downturn? One answer is enterprise automation. By embracing automation, businesses can make the most of their existing talent and work more effectively to navigate an ever-changing market during a time of uncertainty.
Building a resilient, recession-ready marketing machine
While some marketers believe automation is limited to tasks, such as managing CRM and email lists, this only touches the surface. True digital transformation with a customer 360 solution like Salesforce can transform how an organisation works by optimising business processes, improving team collaboration and implementing production efficiencies across the business.
During the pandemic, we learned how brands doubled down on their marketing initiatives to create personalised and focused content that addressed the needs of their target audiences. This was what saw the success of some companies, and the demise of others – who couldn’t adapt quickly enough. Successful marketers used marketing automation software to deliver workflows, personalise content and drive efficiencies, even when half their teams were furloughed.
In challenging times, marketers should be innovating for rapidly changing customers and interacting with them in real-time; putting a heightened focus on automation. According to the latest research conducted by Salesforce (Salesforce State of Marketing), 72% of marketers say meeting customer expectations is more difficult than a year ago. Identifying a use case for automation and then manually testing this to validate assumptions and assess performance is incredibly important to understanding if automation should be used.
Bailey Green, Principal at Pracedo 
This agile approach enabled businesses to carry on and brands to establish themselves as thought leaders during the pandemic, ready for when the economy picked up. It’s this same process that helps create efficient, data-driven results and should be used during a recession to help get through stormy weather.
With Salesforce, you can do more with less – keeping your headcount low, without sacrificing quality or effectiveness.
Knowledge is power, but only if you act on it
To make the most of automation, marketing teams need to be proactive and understand how to best use the technology at their disposal. This means taking the time to study how other companies are using it and learning from their successes (and failures) when considering their investment.
A growing understanding of how teams can use marketing automation to become more resilient has caused an increased investment in marketing automation software solutions like Salesforce Marketing Cloud. However, organisations that have fully adopted marketing automation are still in the minority.
Bailey Green, Principal at Pracedo
- 81% of companies with large budgets use marketing automation, whereas only 44% of small companies use it.
- However, 60% of companies thought that the implementation of marketing automation was difficult to execute.
One of the main reasons for this could be that marketing automation is often treated as a separate tool, when in fact, it should be seen as an integral part of your organisation’s entire marketing solution.
Successful marketing requires three pillars: people, processes and technology.
You need:
- The right technology to create a scalable, sustainable solution that supports your goals (automation)
- The right team in place to manage and operate the system (talent)
- The right processes to drive efficiencies (processes)
Failure to execute on one of these pillars will mean that your organisation cannot pivot or adapt to change as quickly as your competitors, which could be the difference between success and failure in a recession.
Investing in technology during tough times
Technology should not be seen as a replacement for people, but as an enabler that allows marketing teams to become more agile, efficient and effective. The real value of automation is in its ability to drive operational efficiencies. By automating menial or time-consuming tasks, businesses can free up their talent to focus on strategic initiatives.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud can automate a number of processes, from email marketing and list management to lead nurturing and customer journeys. This gives organisations the ability to drive efficiencies without sacrificing quality or customer experience. By allowing businesses to personalise at scale and deliver seamless customer experiences that are tailored to their needs, Salesforce Marketing Cloud gives businesses the agility to rapidly respond to changes in market conditions, such as a sudden increase in demand or a change in customer behaviour.
Bailey Green, Principal at Pracedo
Streamlining your marketing for success
To recession-proof your marketing, you need to closely examine your processes and ensure they are as streamlined and efficient as possible. When headcount might be scrutinised, it’s more important than ever to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck.
Automation can help businesses to focus on the most important tasks and eliminate inefficiencies so that they can become more agile, adaptable and productive. When Easyjet streamlined their marketing by moving over to Salesforce from Mailchimp, they saw a 50% increase in email open rates thanks to an increased ability to gain a 360-degree view of their customer and easily design personalised emails journeys at scale.
Transforming your talent shortage into a competitive advantage
It’s not just processes and technology that need to be adapted in a recession. To survive – and thrive – businesses need to change the way they think about their talent.
The biggest benefit to enterprise automation is that it allows employees to escape mundane or difficult tasks. This will ensure that they can refocus their attention on other projects.
As growth slows, it’s essential to use your staff where they will have the most influence. So, by automating repetitive processes, you free up your team’s time and creativity for higher-impact work.
Implementing marketing automation for success
Organisations need to move towards a more agile model where they partner with specialist providers, like us, who can quickly scale up or down their workloads and increase the success of new technology. Our skilled teams ensure high adoption rates whenever we’re brought on board. This allows businesses to be more responsive to change, while navigating the talent shortage and adapting their marketing initiatives quickly to an ever-changing market.
Automation has the ability to positively impact businesses regardless of size or industry, by simplifying processes and increasing team productivity. However, while evaluating your company’s automation investment in light of recent economic events, remember that humans are still necessary to ensure its success.
By automating now, you will increase efficiency and be able to do more with less in your business—gains that will continue proving value even after the recession. This is important because no matter how good the economic market is, every business can increase its efficiency.
Bailey Green, Principal at Pracedo
If you want to start building a resilient marketing strategy that uses automation to adapt to future demands, you’ll create a legacy that will pay off for years to come.
Why choose Pracedo to implement your marketing automation solution?
We help our customers to use marketing automation to reach their business goals and fast-track their marketing success. By tailoring each solution to each customer, we ensure that our customers have a scalable solution that can skyrocket their growth.
Bailey Green, Principal at Pracedo
Get in touch if you’d like us to:
- Deliver best practice across your business and ensure that your marketing automation needs are targeted to your business goals
- Design bespoke customer journeys for your audience, saving your team time and resources.
- Enable your teams to utilise actionable data for marketing communications and personalisation
- Alleviate pressure on your teams to build automation processes without the technical knowledge or training.
- Increase the adoption of your marketing automation solution by effectively training your team to successfully build digital transformation projects with Salesforce.
- Save time and money by fast-tracking your success with Marketing Cloud and ensuring that your platform will launch when you need it to.
- Deliver a people-focused approach to automation that puts your team’s needs first.
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Pracedo is an award-winning Summit (Platinum) Salesforce Consulting Partner that delivers innovative Salesforce implementations to forward-thinking customers.
With over a decade of experience focused on Salesforce, we work with our customers to unlock the platform’s power through tailored implementations that facilitate achieving business goals and ambitions. Our team of certified Salesforce consultants globally provides a tailored consultancy service, drawing the breadth and depth of knowledge earned from over 1000 projects across our various locations in London, Melbourne, Brisbane, Amsterdam, and Belgrade.
Implementations and customisations include: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
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