INBOX INSIGHTS, October 5, 2022: Business Cases for Strategy, Recession Indicators - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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Using Business Cases to Make Strategic Decisions

I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with end-of-year planning. Or any planning exercise for that matter.

I love planning because it’s an opportunity to review what you’ve done, what you’ve done well, and where there is room for improvement. And then comes the fun part, reacting to all the data and coming up with ideas for what to do next.

But then…

…you have a whole pile of ideas and it can feel overwhelming. That’s where we are right now. We have a lot of good ideas but now we have to go through the exercise of winnowing down the list, prioritizing, and creating plans around each idea from execution to measurement.

You thought I was going to say to use the 5Ps, didn’t you?

Well, you would be right.

The 5Ps in this context is a mini business case.

We know that for Trust Insights our main priority for 2023 will be awareness. We need to bring more people into our ecosystem, and let them know who we are and what we do. We need more prospects at the top of our funnel.

The other side of that is that we’re still operating with limited resources and talent. For us to achieve our goals, it’s pertinent that we stay focused and choose the tactics that are going to yield the best results.

Ok, enough chit-chat. Let’s get into it.

For the sake of this example, let’s say option 1 is to generate more blog content, and option 2 is more public speaking. And in this example, I only have the bandwidth to do one of these things, not both. How do I decide? Let’s run down the 5Ps for each.

Write more content

Purpose: To enhance our organic search results and drive more traffic to the website
People:
- Internal: Me, Chris, and a contractor.
- External: Marketers on the internet that are using a search engine to find specific keywords and topics
Process: Use the predictive keyword calendar to generate topics and write at least three posts a week (to start). Someone will write/edit/schedule the posts. Once the post is live, share it on social media.
Platform: Open AI (or a similar tool) to help get the post started. Google Docs to write the post. WordPress to host the post. Agorapulse to schedule the post on social media.
Performance: XX% increase in site traffic, XX% increase in TOP prospects

More public speaking

Purpose: To drive more awareness and traffic to the website by demonstrating expertise
People:
- Internal: Me, Chris, our virtual assistant (VA).
- External: Event attendees
Process: VA to research and pitch events with our topics. Speaker to create a speaking deck with any associated materials. Speaker to give a talk at an event. Travel as needed.
Platform: The internet for research. Google slides for creating the talk.
Performance: XX% increase in site traffic, XX% increase in TOP prospects

When I look at these two options side by side, a few things stick out to me. The addressable audience with content creation is larger. The risk with the event audience is that it could be the same audience over and over. Ideally, we would reach a new audience but we don’t know that for sure. We also need to convince event coordinators that we are the right speakers. With content creation, as long we do our due diligence with planning, we should be able to reach our correct audience when they are looking.

So, does this mean we can’t look for more public speaking opportunities? Not at all. It is still an important tactic to drive awareness. However, we should spend our time generating more helpful content and publishing it on our website. And if we rethink it, our content creation could be a tactic that leads to more public speaking.

Ok, friends. It’s time to wrap this up. I have a lot of business cases to write and decisions to make.

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Data Diaries: Interesting Data We Found

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about setting expectations around economic events like recessions. The other day, a friend shared this on LinkedIn:

“A lot of people estimate this recession will last five years. It means that you’ll read many stories of companies paring back. Meta just closed an office in NYC. United Airlines halted all flights to JFK.“

I read this and immediately started scratching my head. We haven’t had any major economic events in modern times (post 1970) that have lasted 5 years. Now, at least in the USA, we have had large-scale events in the distant past, such as the Great Depression of 1837 (1837-1944), the Long Depression (1873-1896), and the Great Depression of 1929 (1929-1939). But much of those economic events was caused by conditions that no longer exist, such as an inflexible gold standard, little to no financial regulation, and a pre-modern economy. Since 1970, there has never been an adverse economic event that’s lasted longer than 3 years:

Recessions

We see the recessionary periods indicated in the chart above by vertical shaded regions – no recession has lasted longer than 3 years.

So where did this dire prediction come from and how believable is it? I’m not sure who “a lot of people” are, but it’s pretty unlikely as it stands. I suppose if you count the recovery period – the 12-24 months after a recession when growth resumes, you could make a bit of a case for a 5-year recession. A recession is coming, of course – it’s just a question of when, and what we’ll do about it.

Here’s the better question: how will it affect you, and what will you do to prepare for it?

One of the most important tasks here is to find out whether these macro metrics have any relevance to micro metrics – our metrics. How do we find this out? By comparing the macroeconomic indicators to something relevant to us, like active users in Google Analytics. If we look at a long time horizon, do any of these indicators have a statistical relationship to one of our top of funnel metrics?

Using a technique called LASSO regression, we compare over 200 economic indicators to our desired outcome – active users on the Trust Insights website – and find:

LASSO Regression

That top series name, T10Y3M, is the 10 Year Treasury bill (what consumers call savings bonds) rate minus the 3 Month Treasury bill rate. Generally speaking, when the long term Treasuries go below zero, it means that investors don’t have confidence in locking up their money for 10 years and opt for short term Treasuries instead. It’s one of the top leading indicators of a recession:

TBill

We see near or below zero dips in this indicator reliably before every recession. Now, the measurement of good fit – R-squared – is only 0.37, so it’s not a super strong correlation, but it is statistically significant.

So what? What do we do with this information? Because we know this particular measure has a decent fit to our top of funnel, we can keep an eye on it. When it goes down, we should expect to see some business impact to our company and we can react accordingly.

Based on the chart above, we’re definitely flirting with recession-like indications as that T10Y3M indicator nears zero – it’s done that just before each recession, and we’re close to that line. Whether the recession lasts a quarter or a half decade, it’s nearby and now is the time for us to take action.

Conduct this exercise for your business. Grab a basket of economic indicators that you feel best represent the overall sector you operate in, along with big picture indicators, and see what, if anything, has the strongest relationship to metrics you care about.

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