After two years of a global pandemic, the market rapidly turned into what economists call a bear market in an almost expected turn of events.

Despite knowing that it is on the horizon, many marketers still feel relatively unprepared, and as a result, have slowed or halted their marketing activities, when that is the exact opposite of what they should be doing.

The fear bear markets invoke is entirely emotion-based, and in business, companies cannot rely on emotion to make critical decisions; they must look at the data objectively to identify the right course of action.

Instead of shying away from any marketing activity, marketers need to make more effective strategic decisions that enable them to reduce spending without impacting market share. However, without accurate insight about the global marketing activities in their competitive landscape, that isn’t possible.

Gaining an Accurate Picture of the Market

In today's market, knowing exactly what is going on in your landscape is the first and most critical step in devising an effective marketing strategy.

Companies do not operate in a single market, and as a result, the landscapes they must continually analyze to ensure they know their competitive domain are massive. Marketing intelligence platforms simply that by continually analyzing the digital landscape for you, providing real-time insights about all the marketing activities that matter most to you.

While this can provide valuable information about your competitors, it's first important to understand your own marketing activities to understand if you’re overproducing and wasting resources, or underproducing and losing out on market opportunities.

Sometimes, Marketing Is About Quantity

While it is important to produce quality content that highlights your company’s key differentiators, the impact of quantity cannot be disregarded – especially in today's volatile market. If you do not create enough, your marketing efforts will be lost, however, if you create too much, you are effectively wasting valuable resources that do not have any additional positive impact on your bottom line.

Consider a high-quality article/blog; The hours of concept creation, brief creation, copywriting, revision, and distribution cost companies an average of $2700 per piece.

When looking at the number of content pieces companies create a year to retain relevance in the minds of their audience, the numbers escalate rapidly. And yet, despite the costs, companies continue creating large quantities of high-quality content because they don't always know how much they need to produce to dominate the market for that particular topic.   

How Zenefits Overproduced and Overspent $153,900 in 6 Months

Two years of a global pandemic have changed the global workforce; As a result, HR Software solutions have seen rapid adoption across all industries, making it an incredibly competitive space.  

At Brew, we like competitive spaces because they let us see just how much of an impact our platform can have. Our real-time marketing insight platform continually aggregates information about marketing activities online, identifying topics. Marketers can use this to see how their marketing activities stand compared to their competitors, not to copy them but to learn from them.

We took the HR Software industry as a case study, focusing on the topic of "workforce" over the past 12 months. Our goal was to see if the quantity of the content could be reduced without impacting market share. The clear market leader in this instance was Zenefits.

In the last six months, Zenefits consistently created more workforce-related content than any other company in the HR software domain:

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The idea of producing large quantities of content is to (hopefully) be the market leader and dominate the conversation. Keeping in line with this strategy, we calculated the number of pieces Zenefits could have produced to be 20% above the second highest content producer (and not create more than double and sometimes quadruple what was needed).

Conclusion: Zenefits is over producing workforce-related content.

‍Estimation of costs and savings:

 At Brew, we see the bear market as an opportunity to optimize marketing efforts and reduce spending where it is not creating an impact. In this instance, Zenefits could have reduced the number of content pieces they produced about the topic of workforce without sacrificing its market leader position.   

Skin the Bear

While marketers around the world fear the bear economy conditions, those marketers that use this time to identify growth opportunities, get a better understanding of the conversations their audience is engaging in, quantify their share of voice across each domain, vertical, and landscape, and reduce their costs based on data will find their businesses emerging on the other side of this stronger.

On wall-street, they call it a bear economy because of the idea that one should not "sell a bear's skin before catching it" – but in marketing, I highly recommend selling the bear's skin before you catch it.

However, if you know exactly what kind of bear your customer wants, what color skin they prefer, and how much it will cost you to get it, you know that when you find your bear, you will have a buyer for it and isn't that what marketing is all about?

That is what Brew is all about.