Downsizing business? Here's our guide on how to succeed with decreased budgets and higher marketing goals

Helpful summary

Overview: We provide strategies for businesses to succeed amidst decreased budgets, focusing on cost-effective marketing channels like SEO and content marketing, and emphasizing agility and data-driven decision-making in this article.

Why you can trust us: Our expertise in optimizing low-cost, high-return channels like SEO has delivered significant results for clients such as UXCam. By targeting commercial and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) queries, we've improved their organic traffic, user engagement, and lead generation rates within just 6 months.

Why this is important: Investing in SEO agencies can increase website traffic, user engagement, and revenue. This is vital for businesses facing budget cuts, as SEO provides a cost-effective way to achieve marketing goals.

Action Points: Embrace digital transformation and focus on low-cost, high-impact tactics like SEO and content marketing, while also fostering innovation and building strategic partnerships.

Further Research: Businesses should investigate further case studies and research on efficient SEO strategies, particularly in contexts of budget constraints.

Finding ways to maximize SEO content marketing opportunities?

In these uncertain times, marketers are figuring out what to do in order to survive and grow, while businesses downsize and decrease their marketing budget.

In this guide, I will explain the 5-step cycle to SEO content marketing that focuses on agility, execution, and measuring meaningful data to maximize your efforts on these low-cost channels and build on them.

Why listen to us?

In the challenging journey of downsizing, small businesses often face the dual task of managing reduced resources while seeking growth. At Embarque, we've navigated these waters with clients like UXCam and SignHouse.

We helped UXCam by targeting commercial and bottom-of-the-funnel queries, demonstrating an adept strategy for maximizing marketing impact with limited resources. The result? Their organic traffic flow surged to over 17,153 visitors per month, with mostly high-conversion, commercial queries.

Check out how we transformed SignHouse's zero web traffic into 60,000 monthly visitors, leveraging quality content and strategic backlinking​​​​​​.

Why are businesses downsizing?

In 2008, companies were forced to downsize, trim the fat, and make their processes leaner to survive.

Today, the downturn has already begun and is being exacerbated by the pandemic.

Millions of people around the world have been laid off, and have much less purchasing power than before. Most non-essential services and stores have been closed, reducing overall movement.

While this is only temporary, businesses are being negatively affected by this downturn, especially those that have dedicated much of their marketing to offline advertising. Even online ads are getting fewer clicks because no one is simply in the mood to buy.

In this new reality, companies will have to adapt to survive. Those who can take advantage of compounding marketing channels will be able to reap the benefits.

The impact of COVID-19 on marketing goals

Conductor, a content marketing platform, recently published a study on the impact of COVID-19 on marketing processes. Some of the key takeaways include:

1. Decreased marketing budget
2. Downsizing marketing teams
3. More importance towards SEO

Recent trends in business downsizing reflect a variety of factors beyond the 2008 economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As of 2023, these trends include:

1. Tech sector cuts: Significant layoffs in tech, with firms like Coinbase, Amazon, Salesforce, and Vimeo reducing staff due to economic challenges​​.
2. Retail and food industry downsizing: Retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond and food companies like McDonald's are restructuring for efficiency​​.
3. Financial services reductions: Wall Street banks trimming jobs amidst economic pressures, higher interest rates, and a shift towards AI and automation​​.
4. Strategic shifts: Companies like Spotify and LinkedIn are implementing reorienting strategies, leading to job cuts in various sectors​​.
5. Media adjustments: Alphabet’s news division is downsizing as part of changes in the online media landscape​​.

These examples demonstrate that current downsizing trends are influenced by a mix of economic uncertainties, strategic business decisions, and shifts toward new technologies and efficiency measures.

On the other hand, technological advancements, particularly in automation and AI, are reshaping the workforce:

1. Increased need for tech and social skills: Demand for advanced technological and social-emotional skills is rising, while the need for basic cognitive and physical skills is declining.
2. Shift to higher cognitive skills: Higher cognitive skills like critical thinking and creativity are more sought after, as basic data-input tasks are automated.
3. C-suite perspectives: Executives foresee greater importance for advanced IT and programming skills, with a reduced need for physical and manual skills due to automation.

These trends are transforming workforce requirements and reducing the need for large teams in certain areas.

Decreased budget but higher investment in low-cost channels

Companies are decreasing their marketing budgets and in worse-case scenarios, they are firing their marketing employees.

Kayak, a popular travel app, has fired its brand marketing teams in London and Berlin.

Under these circumstances, the budget for high-spend, paid marketing activities has understandably decreased, including for all types of advertising.

But the inverse is true for SEO and other low-cost channels, as marketing teams now seek to invest in channels with compounding results. In fact, 63% of the marketers surveyed will increase their SEO spend.

In 2023, businesses are adapting to reduced marketing budgets by:

1. Focusing on digital transformation: Increasing investment in digital channels, particularly in marketing technology like AI and virtual/augmented reality.
2. Prioritizing low-cost tactics: Emphasizing cost-effective methods like social media, email marketing, and content marketing.
3. Creating quality content: Concentrating on bottom-funnel content like white papers and e-books.
4. Optimizing effective channels: Analyzing data to identify and focus on the most productive marketing channels.
5. Building strategic partnerships: Exploring affiliations, including affiliate marketing, to extend reach.
6. Encouraging innovation: Fostering a culture of experimentation and agility within marketing teams.

These strategies aim to maximize impact and growth despite financial limitations.

At Embarque, we understand that effective SEO and digital marketing strategies are crucial for companies facing financial constraints. Our services focus on identifying and optimizing low-cost, high-return channels like SEO. 

We provide comprehensive expertise in keyword research, content optimization, and analytics to ensure your investment yields the best possible ROI. Our goal is to help your business maintain or enhance its marketing impact, leveraging our skills to maximize the value you get from every marketing dollar spent, even in times of budget cuts.

Paid marketing is not scalable

Paid marketing channels are not as scalable as people consider them to be.

Paid ads and other marketing channels have decreasing returns over time. In Adstage’s Q4 2019 Paid Media Benchmark Report, the report indicated that the cost to get one thousand views on ads would go up and down based on ad competition.

In other words, when it comes to getting customers, too many companies using ads will lead to fewer clicks over time, as people get more grow tired of them. More competing ads also lead to increasing ad-spend for the same amount of impressions.

Unless ads have been giving you a direct return on investment, focusing on compounding channels may be the best bet to see long-term results.

While getting clicks and impressions helps companies reach new clients immediately, low-cost channels like SEO and content marketing two allow you to scale up your processes over time and take ownership of your marketing channels.

When you’re downsizing and focusing on getting results, you don’t want to rely on ad platforms that can increase your costs for the same results over time.

The 5-step process to seize marketing opportunities in SEO and content marketing

When it comes to SEO and other low-cost channels where results compound over time, it is very important to identify untapped areas that you can exploit.

It is by looking through the data available and seeing the blind spots that you will find market opportunities that your competitors — especially the bigger ones — might fail to identify.

But how do you correctly recognize them and create momentum within these low-cost channels to keep on growing while your business downsizes?

Well, through a very lean and agile five-step cycle of research, creation, distribution, analysis, and repurposing SEO content that ranks on Google.

Through these 5 steps, you’ll be able to identify SEO and content marketing opportunities and act on them swiftly,

SEO trick: steal your competitors’ keywords

When you have an SEO tool like Ahrefs, you can spy on your competitors’ SEO marketing efforts and optimize for keywords that they’re not ranking well in.

As you can see here, this company is ranking for keywords that gets thousands of results every month, but are otherwise very easy to rank in. Create better content to steal your competitors’ keywords.

Here are the steps on how I managed to find these keywords:

1. On Ahrefs, under Dashboard, enter the name of your competitor.
2. On the left side of the screen, there’s a menu. Go to Organic search > Organic keywords.
3. To steal their low-hanging keywords, filter Keyword Difficulty to a maximum of 10.
4. Filter the volume to 1000 or beyond.
5. Identify the ones you can rank in.
6. Enjoy.

WARNING: If you don’t know how to use SEO tools like Ahrefs, make sure that you learn basic SEO first before investing in these relatively expensive products, or you’ll just end up wasting your money.

Otherwise, please hire an SEO service to do the grunt work for you on keyword analysis.

SEO is quite a powerful channel for businesses everywhere. if you are more local, an additional measure that you can do is to build your local SEO strategy through citations and local business directories.

This will boost your rankings in your specific region and help you target more clients in your vicinity. Win-win.

Create great content

Of course, building great content is your next step to start your SEO campaign. After all, there are actually only two main ways to rank on Google:

Create great SEO content through landing pages and blog posts.

Getting backlinks (this is the way that Google measures the buzz on your website).

Of course, there are nuances behind them, as well as many tactics that you can do to rank better, but stripped to its core, every SEO strategy boils down to these two things.

And how do you create great SEO content? Here are some ways:

1. Make sure that your content targets both single-word and long-tail keywords.
2. Consistently produce on the same topics. Over time, Google will see you as an authority on the subject. 
3. Include current, relevant research, but make the overall topic evergreen (ie it should stand the test of time).
4. Make it more informative than any of the first 10 articles ranking in the keywords you want to target.
5. Make sure that it has more words than any of the articles on the first page.
6. Or you can just leave it all to us

At Embarque, our focus is to assist online businesses in crafting high-quality, SEO-optimized content. We understand the importance of striking the right balance between engaging content and search engine visibility.

Our team specializes in developing content that effectively targets both single-word and long-tail keywords, ensuring broader reach and relevance. By leveraging our expertise, we can help businesses create content that resonates with their audience and performs well in search engine rankings.

For example, with UXCam, we nearly doubled their organic traffic in just 6 months, increasing it from around 9,333 to over 17,153 monthly visitors. This led to significant improvements in user engagement and lead generation for UXCam​​​​​​.

Our approach includes thorough research, strategic keyword integration, and crafting narratives that not only captivate readers but also align with SEO best practices.

I’ll be posting a benchmarking guide that helps you measure the quality of your content soon, so subscribe if you want to get notified.

Build your (email) list

This is pretty self-explanatory. Building your list will help you create and nurture your community of readers and customers who like what you offer and want you to succeed.

Bear in mind that getting a new customer is at least 5 times more expensive than retaining current ones.

While many of your newsletter subscribers may not be paying customers yet, you can build authority and trust by constantly producing amazing content, which will then help them convert.

It is very important to note that most content marketing is based on capturing your readers’ attention.

Anything related to sales should occur later on when they’ve warmed up to your brand and see the value that you offer.

As such, when you’re doing content marketing, you always need to supplement it with other marketing activities in order to be effective.

The ROI of content marketing surfaces when paired up with other marketing channels, like email, SEO, and community-building.

Online, content is essentially a method of communication, a way to relay your expertise to the people who are ready to listen to you.

For example, SAP is an enterprise software company in Germany that began its content marketing efforts in 2012.

While their content marketing efforts enabled them to reach a new type of audience that only learned them via Google Search, they realized that while they were subscribing to the company newsletter, they weren’t purchasing any of their products.

It was only until they nurtured these email subscribers through great content and webinars that they began seriously looking into SAP as a possible solution.

By the end of the year, the $100k they spent on content marketing resulted in $750k revenue or almost 7x in ROI.

Content is the gateway to bigger returns.

Measure your SEO content marketing efforts

Anything that gets measured gets done.

This is the most crucial step in making sure that you really maximize the ROI on low-cost channels.

In content marketing, you always need to measure your content marketing efforts. Below is an easy template that you can use to measure your results. Subscribe to get it to your inbox.

Some notes on the most important metrics:

1/ The Month # columns depend on how fast your content pieces on average begin to rank on Google, so the first one should refer to the number of the month when your article starts to rank on Google, and the second one is when the traction becomes apparent.

For example, if your content begins ranking after 2 months, then the first one can be Month 3 and the second one can be Month 5. Include the date at which you’re measuring.

The traction is based on a multitude of other factors, too, including the quality of the content you produce and the difficulty of the keywords you want to rank in.

But generally, if you have a sound SEO strategy, these factors will already be taken into consideration

The more authoritative your site gets, the easier it should be to rank over time. In other words, Month 3 can turn into Month 2 after months or years of SEO growth.

The key here is to standardize your SEO efforts and to make sure that you consistently get results from them.

2/ Bounce rate refers to the rate at which people leave your site after visiting this page.

The lower it is, the better because this indicates that your content is so relevant to your service that people feel compelled to visit the other pages on your website.

The more readers you get, the higher your bounce rate will be because you’re catering to wider interests, but it’s always a good practice to keep this number below a certain threshold (say, 60%).

Also, a lower bounce rate can help you rank higher on Google because it might indicate that your content is great.

3/ Time on page measures how long visitors spend on your page. High numbers indicate that your visitors are actually spending time to read your content.

If your article has over 2000 words and visitors leave after 20 seconds, this can mean that what you’re producing isn’t relevant or high-quality enough.

4/ If you’ve used ads to generate views on your content, please include that in your measuring process. This will show whether ad views boost or rankings or not (it may in some cases).

Repurpose and republish

If your content hasn’t ranked for a year, deindex it, or republish a better version of it. If it’s ranking but not high enough, republish it with more words and more relevant research.

You really need to be both methodical and draconian when it comes to getting the ROI for your SEO content marketing results, or your content will remain mediocre and subpar, and will never rank.

As for repurposing, do note that your SEO blog posts can be repurposed into other great pieces of content for other channels. Maybe turn that blog into an Instagram or LinkedIn slider.

A great example of our expertise in this area is our work with MentorCruise. We identified their challenge: they needed to improve their SEO presence and target specific queries effectively. Our solution was a tailored content strategy that pinpointed these queries, especially for audiences at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

The result? A 47% increase in organic traffic and a significant jump in their conversion rate. By adapting and distributing content across various platforms and marketing funnel stages, we ensure each piece of content has a defined purpose and reaches its intended audience. 

Here are some advantages of repurposing existing content:

1. It is cost-effective. Do more with less. Repurposing existing content means that you won’t need to do extensive research anymore on a topic.

2. It helps you experiment with other marketing channels. For example, if you can turn those posts into Quora answers, then you just answered someone’s question and saved time on doing the research for that answer yourself.

3. It helps you improve on old content. If you see some knowledge gaps, this can be the perfect opportunity to make the old content even better in the future.

SEO and content marketing is a process

Once you have perfected this system, then you have a perfect process of maximizing the ROI of low-cost channels like SEO and content marketing.

It is by doing this process that you will be able to achieve your marketing goals and even surpass them while your company is downsizing.

Too long; didn’t read

While companies are downsizing due to the downturn, they’re investing more money in low-cost channels in content marketing and SEO

For low channels to be effective, you need to develop a process that will allow you to measure your growth and eliminate things that aren’t working.

Follow this 5-step cycle to succeed in your SEO and content marketing efforts.

Things to remember for businesses undergoing downsizing

1. SEO is a lifesaver in tough times

When a business needs to cut costs, SEO is your best friend. It's cheap and the benefits grow over time, unlike pricey ads.

2. Content marketing: a smart move when budgets are tight

Got a tight budget? No problem. Focus on content marketing. It keeps your customers close and interested, even when you're saving pennies.

3. Create top-notch SEO content

Aim to cover both simple and detailed keywords in your content. Stick to your topics, and make sure your content is fresh, fun, and even better than your competition.

4. Measure your content marketing success

To see if your content is hitting the mark, keep an eye on your website traffic and if it's making you money.

6. Repurpose content

Got old content? Make it new again. It's an easy and cheap way to keep up with your marketing without starting from scratch.

7. Don't forget social media and emails

Besides SEO and content, don't forget to chat with your customers on social media and email. It's another great way to share your stuff.

Achieve high marketing goals with low budgets with Embarque!

In navigating the challenging task of downsizing, businesses can still chart a path toward growth by using the power of SEO and content marketing. 

By shifting to these cost-effective strategies, you can easily adapt without giving up your valuable marketing goals. The key is to create impactful, high-quality content and use smart, data-driven SEO techniques to drive organic traffic and user engagement. This approach not only maximizes your return on investment but also ensures sustainable growth in a competitive digital landscape.

So, even when facing financial constraints, businesses can still thrive by making strategic and smart use of their marketing resources.

Are you ready to achieve great marketing success witha limited budget? Experience it now with Embarque!