During an economic recession, marketing budgets and ROAS tend to come under much closer scrutiny.
You should read this article for reasons not to cut back on your SEO spend during a recession.
The next question is about ROI and what you can do to mitigate the problems that arise.
During an economic downturn, goals for reducing churn are reinforced. Your sales pipelines may see less activity and the C-suite may be more focused on MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and ARR (annual recurring revenue).
In this article, I will look at subscription-based businesses and some methods and strategies that can focus their SEO efforts on maintaining performance and SEO ROI (return on investment).
Understand why accounts cancel
Customers cancel their subscriptions for myriad reasons, but during an economic downturn, the reasons tend to center on cost and perceived value.
Other reasons include not receiving enough value from the subscription, having difficulty canceling the subscription, or feeling that customer support is unresponsive or unhelpful.
You can identify these issues before customers provide feedback on an exit survey. Create opportunities for conversations and feedback loops with the sales and customer service teams. This allows customers to address concerns before canceling.
Aim for withdrawal and depreciation
To show this value, we can tailor our content and messaging to show opportunity costs and how the upfront costs prevent a larger shortfall in the long run.
Inefficiency in using the software is an identifiable problem.
Within the organization, teams should be able to grant you access to DAU (daily active users) and MAU (monthly active users) data.
Companies often boast of having high numbers at a time, but the data can also be used to identify under- or low-login accounts, and these can then be collected and reached.
- Put low- and mid-level subscription accounts in an email glove and reach out to them. Offer a consultation with an accountant. You can also ask them to fill out a feedback form to identify pain points and help build a content strategy.
- Contact accounts with high-level subscriptions with existing account managers.
Resolving customer issues can be as simple as rephrasing elements of commercial product pages, adding additional sections, or backing up the value proposition with case studies.
You can also address these issues with traditional blog content. Add more support articles to your support center and enhance existing ones with media like videos to address common friction points.
Development of content against value traps of the competition
Price is probably the most difficult reason to leave predictions and management behind. The price is determined and determined by other business needs and costs. While it may make sense to offer deals for high-value accounts, lowering the price in a big way is probably not an option.
Price and cost depend on the value your solution offers. So, demonstrating your benefits can help customers justify their spending.
The cost of any solution must at least offset the problem or add value.
This is called a cost-benefit analysis. A key part of a cost-benefit analysis is comparing the cost of the solution to the benefits and determining an NPV.
During this evaluation, your messaging may leverage and demonstrate additional benefits or benefit enhancements over your competitors.
In SaaS, you could break this down as comparisons between product items and generic “package” items:
- Direct product features and performance of those features.
- Indirect product features and “add-ons” that complement the core product.
- The scope of the solution on a monthly or yearly basis.
- The number of user seats/sub accounts per main account.
- Customer support responsiveness (and level of customer support).
A typical approach to highlight competitor pitfalls is comparison charts and our brand vs competitor branded URLs and blogs.
These sites then compete with the versions of your competitor and independent sites, affiliates, and other reviews for clicks and to influence consumer opinion.
You must also explain these advantages and competitive advantages on the product pages themselves.
Bullet listing of product features is commonplace. Make sure, however, that the benefits are explained directly to your competitors. This can help ensure that these competitive advantages resonate better with your target group.
Reinforcing Brand Solution Compounds
A compound trademark search term is a term made up of two or more words that refers to a specific trademark.
For example, the compound search term “Decathlon Rain Cover” would highlight users who are specifically looking for Decathlon branded Rain Cover.
Users who conduct such searches also confirm the connection between topics and brands, helping Google better understand relationships and relevancy.
To optimize compound search terms, you need to understand the concept of semantic marketing. That means knowing how different words, phrases, and ideas relate in terms of their meaning.
You should research how your target audience is searching for information about your product or service and use those search terms in your content.
Another strategy you can use is to add modifiers to your search terms.
This can be words like “best”, “like” or other qualifiers that make the search more specific. This will help you get more targeted traffic that is likely to convert better than generic search terms.
summary
While these are uncertain times and the competition for users and recurring revenue is intensifying, aligning your SEO and content strategy around value propositions and addressing consumer friction can help better qualify leads and counter objections consumers raise against competitors will.
With this strategy, the keyword search volume and other values may not be high. When you address user friction and concerns, the value is qualitative, not quantitative.
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