Marketing budgets and ROAS are typically more scrutinized during recessions.
Read this article to find out why you shouldn’t cut back on your SEO spending during a recession.
The next question is about ROI and what can be done to mitigate future problems.
The objective of reducing customer churn is amplified during recessions. With less activity in the sales pipeline, management may focus more on his MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) and his ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).
This article discusses subscription model-based businesses and some ways and strategies you can redirect your SEO efforts to maintain performance and SEO ROI (return on investment).
Understand why your account is canceled
Customers cancel subscriptions for myriad reasons, but during economic downturns, reasons tend to gravitate toward cost and perceived value.
Other reasons include not getting enough value from your subscription, having difficulty canceling your subscription, or finding customer support unresponsive or unhelpful.
You can identify these issues before your customers provide feedback in exit polls. Create opportunities for conversations and feedback loops with your sales and customer service teams. This allows the customer to address any concerns before canceling.
Target low engagement and lack of value
To show this value, content and messages can be pivoted to show the opportunity cost and how the initial cost will prevent a larger shortfall in the long run.
Encountering friction in using software is an identifiable problem.
Within your organization, your team should be able to provide access to DAU (daily active users) and MAU (monthly active users) data.
Companies often brag about having high numbers of each, but the data can also be used to identify accounts with below-average or spare login frequencies, match them up, and get in touch.
- Put accounts for low- and mid-tier subscriptions in your email gauntlet and reach out. Please discuss this with your accountant. You can also ask them to fill out our feedback form to identify any issues that can help you build your content strategy.
- Contact your higher subscription account With your existing account manager.
Addressing customer issues can be as simple as rephrasing elements on your product pages, adding sections, or reinforcing your value proposition with case studies.
These problems can also be solved with traditional blog content. Add support articles to the Support Center and build on existing articles with videos and other media to address common pain points.
Developing Content Against Competitor Value Pitfalls
Price may be the most difficult reason to retire due to predictability and management. Prices are informed and determined by other business needs and costs. While it might make sense to offer deals to high-value accounts, significantly lowering prices is probably not an option.
Pricing and cost are driven by the value provided by the solution. As such, demonstrating benefits helps customers justify their spending.
The cost of the solution should at least offset the problem or provide added value.
This is known as a cost-benefit analysis. An important part of cost-benefit analysis is comparing the costs and benefits of solutions to determine the net present value.
During this evaluation, the message can be substantiated with additional or enhanced advantages over competitors.
In SaaS, this can be categorized as a comparison of both the product element and the overall “package” element.
- Direct Product features and the performance of those features.
- Indirect product features and “add-ons” that complement the core product.
- Bandwidth for solutions on a monthly or yearly basis.
- Number of user seats/subaccounts per main account.
- Customer support response speed (and level of customer support).
A typical approach to highlighting the pitfalls of our competitors is to use comparison charts and URLs and blogs of our brand versus our competitor’s brand.
These pages compete for clicks with versions of competitors, independent websites, affiliates and other reviews and influence consumer opinion.
You should also describe these benefits and competitive advantages on the product page itself.
Bullet points listing product features are common. But make sure the benefits are stated directly against your competitors. This helps these competitive advantages resonate with your target audience.
Strengthening brand solution compounds
A compound brand search term is a term consisting of two or more words that refers to a specific brand.
For example, the brand compound search term “Decathlon waterproof” highlights users looking for Decathlon branded waterproofs.
Users making such searches reaffirm the connection between topic and brand, helping Google to better understand relationships and relevance.
To optimize branded compound search terms, you need to understand the concept of semantic marketing. This means knowing how different words, phrases, and ideas are related in terms of meaning.
You should research how your target audience searches for information related to your product or service and use those search terms in your content.
Another strategy you can use is adding modifiers to your search terms.
These can be words like “best”, “method”, or other modifiers that make your search more specific. This can get you more targeted traffic that is more likely to convert than generic search terms.
overview
These are uncertain times, with more competition for our users and stronger recurring revenue, but we are reorienting our SEO and content strategy to focus on our value proposition and address consumer friction points. This allows you to better screen your prospects and provide the controversial questions consumers would ask your competitors.
Keywords may not have high search volume or other values with this strategy. When it comes to addressing user friction points and concerns, the value is qualitative, not quantitative.
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