Marketing

How To Create A Recession Proof Content Marketing Plan

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Gael Breton

Graphic of a blog page with the blog titled Top 10 Life Hacks across the top of the page
Graphic of a blog page with the blog titled Top 10 Life Hacks across the top of the page

The US economy is in recession.

By all financial and commercial metrics, it does look like there are tough times coming.

That’s not much of a surprise – our economy works in cycles, so periods of economic downturn are expected every now and then.

But the current economics crisis is unlike anything most of us have seen before. A global pandemic isn’t a usual occurrence.

Yet in all the turmoil, there is a silver lining – consumer behaviours changed, but the consumers you’re trying to reach are still the same.

They have the same desires, plans, and willingness to take action.

With the right content marketing plan, you can still use that to your advantage.

So let’s see how to create a recession-proof content marketing plan.

The intricacies of this economic downturn

In a usual period of economic downturn, buying power goes down, spending goes down and the best practice is to have some money set aside to ride the storm out.
That’s still important.

But there are interesting characteristics to the current crisis.

First, people spend more time indoors due to social distancing measures. Implicitly, that means the use of the internet increased, both for leisure and productive activities.
Second, remote work is getting trendier everyday. A few months ago, Twitter and Square announced that all of their employees will, from then on, have the option to work remotely.

Lastly, that means that successful niches aren’t what they used to be.

For example, travel took a big hit with lockdown measures implemented during the Spring.

But even more importantly, some niches boomed, like medical supplies.

So you want to take all of that into account when thinking any business process through – including your content marketing.

To help with that, we analyzed all niches for affiliate marketing and came up with an updated CoVid list of the best niches in affiliate marketing.

Here’s the takeaway: Any online marketing practice has more potential when people are working remotely and spending more time indoors.

So you should keep that in mind.

Content marketing plan best practices

Like any business process or asset, a content marketing plan can be adapted to be recession-proof.

But that’s not the first step.

The first step is to understand that process or asset in general.

Content audit

Your content audit is the building block of a content plan.
Picture1 | Award-Winning Digital Marketing Agency

Get a grasp on all of your distribution channels.

Map out every little piece of content you ever shared.

And crunch them all together in a spreadsheet that’s easy to understand and navigate.

The content audit is important because it helps you plan for the future. If you have a Facebook page with 3000 followers and a blog bringing in 500-

600 readers a month, you can set realistic goals as to when you’ll reach 10.000 followers and 5000-6000 readers a month.
Lay it all down, and separate it based on target audience and product targeted.

Speaking of…

Defining an audience

You can have the best Facebook copy or long-form reviews, if they’re not written for the right person, they will not convert.

Let’s backtrack a little bit.

What drives sales?

Sure, some people will make purchase decisions rationally.

But that’s not the norm, even when talking about B2B sales.

Emotion drives sales more than anything. This doesn’t mean you should default to the fluff-filled, sleazy copy of “gurus” to make more money and ride out a recession.

Most of the people that bought a spot on our Authority Site System platform chose us because we don’t believe in the fluff and unrealistic expectations set by gurus like Sabri Suby or Tai Lopez.

We speak honestly and we love showing you the real numbers.

But here’s the thing – our clients feel like we understand them when we decide to speak the blunt truth about what it takes to create an affiliate website.

What emotion does your product inspire?

What do your visitors think when they end up on your website?

And more importantly – what do you want your ideal customer to look like?

Create a detailed buyer persona and keep that in mind for all of your marketing efforts.

Matching audience segments with types of content

Even if you have one buyer persona, different people need to hear different things.

Moreover, the same person might be looking for different things in two distinct time frames.

So take your buyer persona, or target audience, and segment it based on the type of content you create.

For example let’s say you sell digital marketing courses.

You can’t create an email outreach blog post and promote it to your audience segment that’s interested in social media growth.

So you should clearly define the interests (and any other particularities you can) of your audience, and create content funnels for all of your content categories.

Creating the editorial calendar

Picture2 | Award-Winning Digital Marketing Agency
Once all of that’s taken care of, you can actually plan your content.

Regardless of your channel of distribution, we recommend doing your due diligence on best practices for digital marketing.

No matter where you want to promote yourself, one thing’s clear for all content marketing efforts: you need to maintain a frequency.

It doesn’t matter if you post once a day or once a week.

What matters is that you stick to consistent posting.

That’s important both for the algorithms of different platforms, and for grabbing your audience’s attention.

Once that’s taken care of, there’s one more step for a fully-fleshed content marketing plan.

Tracking and measuring

All marketing decisions should be based on data.

Well, yeah, that’s not always possible so…

As much marketing decisions as you can should be based on marketing.

This includes small things like what time of the day you should release a new podcast episode, and big decisions like what channels you should be present on.

That’s important when you first write a marketing plan.

But it’s even more important for optimizing your current content efforts.

So make sure you track:

  • Traffic
  • Interactions
  • Conversions
  • Channels

And anything else that can have an impact if tweaked right.

Content marketing during economic downturn

So now you have the facts – how a content marketing plan works, and what the current economic downturn is like.

How do you create a recession-proof content marketing plan? 

First, research niches and products better. Any expansion or Go-To-Market effort should be preceded by serious research into what niches work and what niches are expected to go down.

Second, whenever you want to create a piece of content, research the seasonality of that topic with tools like ahrefs or SimilarWeb.

Third, be empathic and “human” in your messaging.

If you do your content marketing plan according to the principles explored above, you should already have an airtight plan in case of any type of recession.

But you need to understand that you’re not selling to numbers on a screen.

The consumers of your content are people with the same fears, expectations and dreams like you.

In case of a recession, their mood and feelings are bound to change.

So adapt to that reality.
Picture3 | Award-Winning Digital Marketing Agency

And in the end

Don’t forget that a good content marketing plan isn’t completely set in stone.

If you want to optimize your messaging, you need to adapt to changes.

So be proactive in your content marketing, and you’ll be better equipped to ride out any storm.

This is a guest contribution from Authority Hacker. 

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