How to Recession-Proof Your Marketing Ops with Automation

Following up on our previous article about recession and automation, today we’re going to get granular on how automation can help marketing operations in turbulent times.

Even though experts advise against marketing budget cuts during recessions, marketing remains one of the most exposed areas in times when economic activity and consumer demand slow down to a crawl.

Nowadays, this can be attributed to custom rather than actual pragmatism: Just 15 or 20 years ago, layoffs and budget cuts still represented the main instruments a company could use to fend off economic downturn.

Granted, marketing in a recession is hard, but things have changed quite a bit since the last big crisis. 

Technology to increase productivity and savings has made leaps and bounds, and digital penetration allows any company to onboard the best tools in the market on the spot. 

Make is the living proof of this statement. 

Our automation platform didn’t even exist when the last crisis hit, and today we’re serving 500,000+ users spanning from solopreneurs and SMBs to companies like Meta, Spotify, Adidas, and Heineken.

With this in mind, we’re gonna show you real-life examples of Make-powered solutions to automate your marketing department into a leaner, more efficient one. 

Before we get there, let’s take a brief moment to look at the problems and pain points Make can solve. 

If you recognize any of the following, then you’ll find in the solutions below the best course of action to reach your goals without firing people or risking major cuts in your marketing budget.

Where do resources get lost in marketing?

Marketing is a game of numbers, but also of perception. 

On paper, every company’s marketing department is poised to pursue a positive return-on-investment (ROI), but also to build unique, strong brands that drive value for customers and company growth - all at the same time.

Examples of this duality are a dime a dozen. Tesla was founded in 2003 and had its first net positive year in 2020. Twitter was founded in 2006 and had to wait until 2018 to become profitable. 

Our point here is clear: If you are building a great brand you have to be able to see past the clouds, but also to keep your feet on the ground and be efficient at attaining the vision.

So, where do resources get lost in the first place?

Aside from the possibility of costly campaigns failing, marketing departments usually struggle with one or more of the following items.

1. Execution times

The time your team spends on marketing efforts has a significant impact in the budget: The longer it takes to complete a task or process, the more expensive it becomes.

Automation is instrumental in reducing execution times to whole new levels, allowing your team to do more in less time, and oftentimes, with fewer people involved.

Take, for instance, lead response times: When done manually, it can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour to craft a relevant response for an interested lead.

On the other hand, it’s possible to reduce response times by 99% with the help of automation.

2. Data-driven decision making

Having a single source of truth to help the decision-making process is one of the ultimate goals for marketing departments, but also one of the most difficult to achieve.

This usually happens for the following reason: Companies operate on an expanding stack of applications, which contain troves of useful data that end up in silos, away from relevant stakeholders.

It is at this point that platforms like Make shine. 

By connecting existing business applications with our powerful single platform, you’ll be able to get the right data where and where you want.

The result? No more silos, and a team that can pride itself on making data-driven decisions for any given project.

3. Lack of capability

“We can’t do X right now because we lack Y”. 

If you work in a marketing department, chances are you’ve heard something along these lines before. 

Automation can help your case in two different ways here. 

First, your team will gain back time to do other things after automating recurring tasks. This an indirect - but very much real - way to add more capabilities when you need them.

Second, your team will be able to build solutions on their own, that is, without having to rely on someone else (from other teams, or external) to do so. 

Just a decade ago, connecting a few apps together to automate a process was not only incredibly costly but also reliant on hard skills that required cross-team collaboration or even new hires.

With Make, you can build and automate marketing processes for a fraction of what it used to cost. Plus, you don’t need to be a tech savant to do it.

This represents a direct way to add new capabilities to your team and start solving problems that clog marketing operations without hiring more people.

Bullet-proofing time: Using Make to automate marketing operations

To close this article, we’ve picked three solutions that match the problems outlined above. 

Let’s start with the first one: Execution times. 

Whether it’s about qualifying and answering leads, posting to social media, or updating the CRM with fresh data, you can automate it with Make.

As for data-driven decisions, you’ll find that Make not only allows you to extract data from your apps automatically but also to generate reports and send them to the right stakeholders - without relying on anyone to get it done.

Finally, new capabilities. Here’s where you can combine creativity with needs. Say that you want to see how people feel about your brand by analyzing what they post on Twitter about it. 

Jumping into social media and frantically searching for every tweet won’t cut it, and you can’t hire someone to do this because you’re trying to stay within budget.

The solution, once again, lies with Make.

Bear in mind, these are just three examples of what you can automate with Make. 

Our template section features hundreds of solutions for marketing alone, and thousands for other business processes - and we’re not even counting the ones you can build on your own by leveraging the visual builder.

So, there you have it: Automation is one of the best answers you can get when it comes to protecting your marketing team. 

All you have to do to get started is a Make account, and the drive to correct course before the economy and consumer demand take a turn for the worse.