In times of crisis, it is natural for businesses to prioritize austerity over growth. This often includes minimizing or eliminating marketing spends and relying almost exclusively on organic growth. The thinking behind this is that during an emergency, brands are better served using their limited resources to nurture existing clients rather than trying to get new ones.

At first glance, this line of thinking certainly seems logical and reasonable. However, large cuts in marketing expenditure should be done cautiously and strategically. This is because, during a crisis, it is likely that businesses may lose existing customers. As a result, some businesses may have fewer customers to nurture and may not be able to survive unless they acquire new ones. Given this reality, it is important for companies to manage marketing budgets in a manner that does not stifle revenue growth opportunities or weaken the company’s longevity.

One way of effectively managing marketing and spends during a crisis is the “Three Cs” method. This simple strategy looks at customers, content and conversions and how to maximize impact with minimal spends.

1. Customers: Don’t Let Them Go

Hold on to your customers by focusing your marketing efforts on retention. Your team can start by retaining existing customers at the bottom of the sales funnel, and then gradually working their way up to the middle and top.

It is important to remember that marketing at each stage of the sales funnel is different. To retain customers at the bottom of the funnel, your brand should use good old email campaigns, which incur no additional costs. You can also use features like custom audiences on Facebook when budgets are tight as it allows you to target bottom-of-the-funnel customers while they are on Facebook. Costs for this can easily be justified as people spend a massive amount of time on Facebook during a crisis.

The next step is to increase visibility and engagement with warm prospects – those ‘non-buyers’ at the middle and top of the sales funnel. These audience segments include cart dropouts, repeat visitors and first-time visitors. To engage them, your marketing team can use Google search ads and efficiently allocate marketing spends so your brand gets visibility throughout the browsing and buying process.

2. Content: Re-purpose and Re-invent

Content is extremely important for remaining relevant and maintaining top-of-mind brand awareness. It’s also an excellent marketing option when budgets are tight.

An efficient way of kickstarting content during a crisis is to dig into your analytics and identify articles that have had great engagement results. It is highly likely that these pieces of content will still be relevant even during a ‘lockdown’ so your marketing team can just tweak them and share them to customers and web visitors via online channels. The content should ideally discuss why your company is still relevant during difficult times and how it continues to innovate and deliver value and savings to customers.

To further improve the dissemination of your content, you should explore automation platforms that boost the efficiency and visibility of campaigns. Today, during the crisis, most software companies provide applications or tools either on a free trial basis or at a very low cost. Furthermore, setting up automation technology is no longer complicated and is usually just plug and play. By using automation for content marketing, your team can save valuable time and resources.

3. Conversions: Optimize Relentlessly (with Artificial Intelligence)

Conversions! Conversions! Conversions! It’s the only metric that matters when things get tough. And conversion rate optimization (CRO) is one of the best low-cost ways to get big wins. But to do it, your team needs to take a deep dive into your analytics and fully understand the ‘conversion journey’.

When companies go into stabilizing mode, it is critical that their marketing teams avoid making assumptions and rely on data. This is especially true for insights about who is converting as well as for experiments to test a hypothesis. By following this, your company can get a quick incremental CRO wins, which have the potential to turn things around if you’ve been exposed to external shocks.

Conversion rates should also be optimized by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI). Web visitors come with hundreds of variables representing many different interests or affinities. While these are captured by web analytics platforms, many companies fail to use the data to optimize conversions. This is because marketing teams cannot manually calculate all the different combinations that lead to a conversion.

To overcome this, your business should explore data science and AI platforms. For example, Alavi is an easy-to-use SaaS application that continuously analyzes website and ad platform data to identify combinations of variables that have the highest probability of converting. Your marketing team can then target audiences who possess these variables at every stage of the sales funnel and optimize conversions during a crisis.

In sum, to completely lockdown your marketing during a crisis is like stopping the clock to save time: it really doesn’t work. For a business to survive, it needs a good balance of austerity and growth. A scenario where a business would need one and not the other literally doesn’t exist.

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