You’re in business to make a profit. This is a simple and true statement, but if you’re only looking at the numbers and your bottom line, you are getting a limited view of your profit margin. How are you profiting the customers you created your products for? When you “sell” from the deeper reason of being in business, you will ride the waves of the economy more smoothly.
You can find many examples of businesses that increased their sales during the various recessions over the years. Take that as proof that your revenue doesn’t have as much to do with the economy as your ability to adjust your message and your offerings to match the way consumers are thinking during an economic downturn. If you have a clear and meaningful mission and vision, you can pivot your marketing as needed to appeal to your ideal customer and discover new opportunities for growth.
As an example, our mission statement clearly describes our desire to connect parents to the resources they need to confidently educate their children, which speaks to our revenue generating (and profit making) activities with homeschoolers and businesses that want to reach the homeschooling market.
Another vital part of our mission is to reach people for Christ. That’s the heart of what we do internally and externally. It’s what has kept us in business for over 20 years now through the ups and downs of the economy and company changes. We’ve kept our mission front and center and adapted as needed to appeal to our audience.
If you’re focused mainly on your profit margin, then you’ll be more rattled when you experience the shifts of an unstable economy or hear news about an economic recession. Then your business decisions may be coming from the wrong place.
If you’re focused mainly on your mission—your deeper reason for being in business—then you’ll see more clearly how you can move through economic uncertainty with your business profits still intact. Business slowdown will happen for different reasons, but slashing your marketing budget isn’t going to improve your market share, especially when it comes to ad spending.
Wise Decisions Are What Make Businesses Grow
This article from Forbes.com, published back in 2019, highlights some of the main reasons to maintain your advertising activities and maybe even make it a higher priority in times of recession. Along with the benefits of advertising during an economic slowdown (like getting ahead of competitors who do cut back on ad spending, projecting brand stability, and increasing market share), this article also cites studies over the last century that show time and again that companies can thrive when they maintain and even increase their ad spending in a weak economy.
By making wise decisions in their marketing approach, many companies have shifted their message and offerings to adapt to the market but kept consistent in advertising and promotion. Go to the article to see how specific companies grew their market share and even became leaders in their industries during a major recession.
An unstable economy or full-blown recession doesn’t need to be your signal to cut back on advertising. Instead, evaluate your marketing plan and consider how you can offer a great deal to match what consumers are thinking for the current economic climate.
Our sales reps can develop low-cost, big-reach packages to provide our advertisers with bundled ad spots to plan out their marketing messages for whatever their needs are. While the homeschooling market has had exponential growth over the past couple of years, appealing to individual concerns of consumers and businesses has been the catalyst for us to create new products, stream internal processes and shift our marketing approach to have more engagement with our audience.
If you don’t have a mission and vision statement already created and posted on your site, now is the time to do it!
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