“Every year, winter comes. It always comes. We deal with it by preparing for it.” – Jim Rohn
Since 1948, there have been 11 recessions. This averages out to approximately one recession per six years.
Recessions can lead to declines in sales and profits for both small and large businesses. They may try to reduce costs by cutting capital expenditure, marketing, and research. Recessions can reduce credit access, slow down collections, and lead to business bankruptcies.
Businesses both large and small should always prepare for tough times ahead. Luckily, there are some recession-proof marketing strategies that can help you grow your business, even in a down economy.
How to Grow a Small Business – Even in a Recession?
Turn off Programmatic Ads
From bots to fraud, to outrageous pricing structures – Programmatic Ads can lead to problematic wasted advertising budgets.
Many digital ad agencies hide behind complex tech, jargon, and poor practices. They rely on brands not being aware of these crucial aspects of online advertising.
Programmatic advertising is the use of automated technology for media buying (the buying of advertising space). This is in contrast to traditional (often manually) digital advertising methods.
Wasted ad spending is the cause of many businesses’ increased debt. While not impossible, it is extremely difficult to grow your business without online advertising. However, popular advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook have not solved the problem of click fraud.
According to Dr. Augustine Fou, MIT graduate and ad fraud researcher, 99% of your marketing budget is wasted.
Dr. Fou’s research suggests that bots, competitors, and useless ad promotions on digital marketing platforms are wasted.
Unless you have an unlimited budget or don’t mind wasting money, stay away from programmatic ads.
Read: OnMyWay: Drive Safe, Get Paid
Focus on Developing a Customer-Centric Culture
Customer-centricity is more than simply focusing on the customer. It’s about really understanding your customer so that you can anticipate their needs, communicate with them in meaningful ways, and create lasting relationships. This is not an easy task.
Businesses can improve customer satisfaction by creating a consistent customer-centric culture. Understanding your customers’ likes and dislikes will help you build products and services that are centered around them and eliminate friction.
In an article published by Forbes, businesses that focus on their customers experience faster growth.
- 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
- Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80%.
- 73% of companies with above-average customer experience perform better financially than their competitors.
- 96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand.
Implementing a rewards program is a great way to get your customers more involved in social media, free word-of-mouth advertising, and get your business in front of more people. In 2022, we launched OnMyWayFood, a rewards program that generates real UGC video content highlighting the restaurant our drivers are visiting, recording a video thanking that restaurant, and sharing the video with their social media followers.
This memorable experience is documented forever and shared with a newly engaged audience. By focusing on the customer experience, OnMyWayFood has driven increased sales and revenue to restaurants both local and national, even in a down economy.
Read: Top 5 Totally Free Mobile Apps That Pay You Real Cash
Decrease Employee Turnover by Recognizing and Rewarding
The biggest problem with employee turnover is the financial cost of recruiting and training new employees in order to replace those who have been laid off. Although the exact cost of turnover is variable, it’s clear that employers must manage it.
The reason why employee turnover is so high is that most companies don’t have exit cost tracking systems. There are a number of factors that can increase costs that can be detrimental during a recession.
These are the factors:
- Customer service and mistakes: New employees often take longer to finish their work and are less skilled at solving problems.
- Training costs A business will likely spend 10% to 20% of an employee’s salary over the course of two to three years.
- Loss of institutional knowledge When long-term employees or highly skilled leave your company, you may lose some institutional knowledge or your combined skill set and experience.
- Cultural Impact: When someone leaves, other people take the time to ask why.
- Recruitment costs These are the direct costs associated with hiring a new employee, including advertising, screening, interviewing, and hiring.
- Onboarding fees: Includes training and management time.
- Loss of productivity: A new employee may need to work for one to two years before they can reach the same level of productivity as an existing employee, which could lead to indirect costs to your company.
- Low engagement and negative impact on employee morale. Other employees who experience high turnover tend not to engage and lose productivity. This can negatively affect team morale.
So how can you reward your employees and keep them engaged?
OnMyWay created a distracted driving employee rewards program for small, medium, and enterprise companies to grow and protect employees and communities. According to OSHA, distracted driving is the number 1 cause of employee deaths.
OnMyWay rewards users with access to food, travel, event, trending products, and even employee referral rewards.
With employer solutions such as Location Based app usage or custom mobile SDK, OnMyWay for employers is the smartest way to keep employees engaged.
Read: Best apps that pay you to drive
Let’s discuss how OnMyWay can help
During an economic slowdown, business owners often seek immediate cost cuts to preserve cash. However, cutting advertising will give your competitors the strategic advantage of having a bigger “voice”.
All business owners fear a recession. Times of uncertainty.
OnMyWay Business Solutions provide a recession-proof marketing strategy to grow your business. Guaranteed!
Don’t spend another day worrying about an economic slowdown. Get started today with a FREE Proposal in 60 seconds.
