Inflation Watch: Creating a Digital Advertising Strategy for a Rainy Day

In today’s economic landscape, advertisers have their work cut out for them. They must balance the pressure of a projected economic downturn while also ensuring their spot in the marketplace remains solid.

These can be overwhelming demands and, as such, require a balance of using strategic tactics while making the best use of your digital advertising budgets to ensure success.

How Does Inflation Impact Businesses?

As inflation rises, consumers become more cautious with spending and are less likely to make discretionary purchases. This makes reaching and persuading consumers more difficult, as they might be more focused on saving money and less receptive to advertising messages.

Let’s add another factor: Consumer habits are quickly changing. As an advertiser, you might feel comfortable investing in traditional forms of media. Yet as consumers move toward newer channels like digital audio and CTV, you must make a choice: continue depending on these channels knowing there might be a smaller, less engaged audience or shift your media budget and test the waters of these new emerging channels.

4 Steps for Effective Digital Advertising

Fortunately, there are ways to get the most out of all these scenarios. Here are four steps to prepare your brand for strategic pivots and bake unforeseen circumstances into your digital advertising budget.

1. Assess the current state of your marketing efforts.

Now is a good time for your brand to check in on strategy and reflect on where you fall within the market. While the start of the year is always a good time for planning and new projects, remember that frequent check-ins throughout the year will ensure you’re meeting your goals and spending media dollars wisely.

Start by answering the following questions:

• What is our current impact on the market?
• What is our value proposition as consumers face a more difficult decision regarding where they spend their money?
• What is our value add in comparison to our competitors?
• Where are we losing consumers in the sales funnel?
• What stories or ad types move the needle with consumers?
• Where can we shift ad spending to target these successes?
• What will be most important to ensure success through the end of the year?

After all, understanding who your target audience is and what they are looking for can help you create more effective and relevant ads.

2. Focus on value and relevance.

After answering the above questions, you’ll have a clear understanding of who your audience is and what they prioritize from the brands they make purchases from. This will be a great help in creating ads that clearly demonstrate value to your target audience. This might entail ads that highlight the benefits of your product or service or a short case study of how you can help them solve a problem or meet a need.

Above all, fight the urge to cut your branding budget. Some advertisers look to pivot their strategy away from brand building and toward performance channels. However, general brand awareness ads can have a great impact on performance, as they fuel awareness, consideration, and reach — all things the brand needs to achieve sustainable growth vs. short-term customer acquisition.

3. Be flexible and adaptable.

Given the economic outlook for 2023, marketers will likely reduce ad spending in the new year. As media costs rise, you must make tough advertising decisions on where to get the most profit and sway through digital advertising innovation.

Remember, the economic climate can change quickly. As such, you must regularly monitor and analyze the performance of your ads and adjust as needed to ensure they are effective. Fortunately, implementing strong marketing analytics at the start of your campaigns can help you quickly pivot your advertising budget away from areas that aren’t working well and toward tactics or channels that are.

 4. Optimize for mobile.

As mentioned above, when budgets are tighter, ensuring you reach your audience as effectively as possible is a huge priority. More and more consumers are using their smartphones to access the internet, so you must optimize your ads for mobile devices. This optimization can include using responsive design and mobile-friendly ad formats to ensure your ads look good and perform well on mobile devices.

When it comes to the mobile experience, testing is critical. Testing and utilizing analytics tools will ensure a seamless user experience and give you confidence when deciding where to dial up or dial back advertising spending.

Take Your Advertising Strategies to the Next Level With Digilant

Economic uncertainty doesn’t mean that advertisers can’t take a risk. It simply means you need to know what you do well to continue doing so. Then, make data-driven, strategic decisions to invest in new opportunities. In the face of economic uncertainty, rooting your decisions in strategy and data will allow your company to weather economic storms and be prepared for success in the coming year.

At Digilant, we’re here to provide you with the tools, resources, and know-how to make it happen. Contact our team of experts today to learn more about how digital advertising innovation can help your business.