Cutting back your marketing during a recession is the beginning of the end for your brand awareness and customer engagement.

When you cut back on your marketing or stop it all together, you quickly disappear. It doesn’t matter how strong your products are or how much brand loyalty you have accumulated.

When your customers don’t see and hear from you, they forget you—and they move on.

No company can sustain this. You need to be relevant. You need to be top-of-mind. You need to be the first choice. You need the competitive advantage that SEO and marketing gives you.  

During a recession, your customers question how and where they spend their money. You want and need them to choose you. They will only do this if your brand is front-and-center.

This is exactly why you need to invest in and bolster your marketing strategies—you need to be visible and remind your customers why they want and need you.

Your competitive advantage during a recession is your marketing strategy. Savvy marketers understand this. Brands that are in it for the long-term know the value of marketing during an economic crisis.

Three Ways Marketing Strengthens Your Health and Wellness Brand During a Recession

Let’s face it, the recession is here. This has everyone questioning how and where they spend their money.

Please do not cut your marketing budget. I know it is tempting to do so. But you still need people to buy your products. People cannot buy your products if they do not know you exist.

Plain and simple: Marketing is your best friend when times are tough.

Marketing during a recession gives you the competitive advantage you need:

1. Marketing establishes your expertise 

Building and reinforcing your expertise is essential to building customer and Google trust. Your customers and Google trust and prefer brands that they recognize.

Your customers have questions, challenges, and concerns. This is your opportunity.

Use your blogs and social media content, organic and paid search strategies, and website to help your customers. Create content that reminds your customers how you help them and that you are here for the long-term.

Strategic marketing enables you to showcase your benefits, strengths, expertise, authority, and value.

2. Marketing is your education strategy

It needs to be easy for people to find you, learn about you, and understand why you are their best choice. Remember, everyone is tired right now and people simply do not have the energy or motivation to research and find answers to their questions.

This is where you step in. Give your customers clear content that educates, helps, informs, empathizes, and meets your customers where they are. This is how you can stand out from your competitors.

Strategic marketing is all about differentiation. What makes you different from other health and wellness brands? How are you going the extra mile to support your customers?

Make it easy for your customers to solve their problems and you earn customers for life.

3. Marketing solidifies your industry authority

You need to be memorable and stand out from your competitors. Having the best supplement is not enough. You need to be noticed and tell you customers why you are their best and only choice.

Investing in marketing now is how you can capitalize on economic uncertainty. Many of your competitors will cut their marketing efforts. This means they will disappear and be forgotten—opening the door for you to gain new customers and be the brand that can always be counted on.

Use your blog content, social media posts, newsletters, videos, whitepapers, and paid search ads to prove to customers that you are here, available, and the authority in the health and wellness domain.

As an extra bonus, Google will be impressed, and this helps improve your search engine results ranking. Remember, establishing expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) is critical for health and wellness brands.

Do not be like your competitors. Use the recession as your opportunity.

A recession is the ideal time to launch a new brand, start a company, and release new products.

Some of the biggest and most powerful brands were launched during a recession.

General Electric, General Motors, Disney, Trader Joe’s, Microsoft, FedEx, IBM, and HP were launched during recessions.

Five Ways to Optimize Your Marketing During a Recession

During a recession, optimize your marketing with these five tactics:

1. Review and update your keywords. What people search for changes—make sure your keywords are still relevant to your customers.
2. Stay active on social media. If you disappear from social media, your customers will forget about you and worse yet, assume you no longer exist. Use social media to strengthen your visibility.
3. Refresh your content strategy. The content plan you created in January no longer fits. People are asking different questions in Google. Create content that answers questions and establishes your expertise and authority.
4. Continue to communicate with your customers. Do not go silent. Continue to send your newsletter, post on social media, and publish blog content. Tell your customers you’re here and available.
5. Update your paid search strategy. Make the most of your paid search budget by updating your ads and landing pages to include your new keywords and customer search habits.

To get people to buy from you, you need to be available, visible, loud, relevant, and engaged. You need to be the brand people and Google know, trust, and choose. 

Marketing does this for you. Marketing matters always.

Marketing matters even more during a recession.

Savvy marketers see the opportunities.

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” Warren Buffett.