I'm Hiten Shah, Co-Founder and CEO of FYI. AMA =)

[Hiten (Hiten Shah)]

@Jayashree

In these unprecedented times, when economy downturn is predicted, how do you make the decision to increase marketing spend ?

During a time like this you have to first evaluate how your marketing campaigns are doing and you might need to rethink your strategy if things are unusual. So the way you determine increasing marketing spend is to first figure out what’s going on with it right now. Has it changed because of the pandemic in any way? And if so, what kind of changes do you need to experiment? This means monitoring your marketing campaigns like you should be doing normally and being ready to make adjustments faster. You can’t increase your marketing spend right now if you don’t know what’s happening with what you’re already spending. My suggestion would be to make sure your marketing spend is effective and with a shorter payback period than usual. So the criteria for success should be changed and increasing marketing spend should only be considered when it can be profitable. This might actually mean you have to decrease your marketing spend to start with and run some experiments in this new environment before you are able to increase it.