The ad copy read, “Are you recession-proof?”

This week, Katie and I were talking about recession planning, especially seeing the weakness in numbers like the OECD Business Confidence Index. Katie remarked that she didn’t like the phrase, even though the concept was sound.

Why? It’s a false claim. Very few things in life are fireproof, bulletproof, etc. A bulletproof vest is really just a bullet-resistant vest. Every vest has vulnerabilities and can eventually be compromised. A fireproof safe is fire-resistant for normal housefires over a certain period of time only, and as housefires get hotter, faster (due to synthetics in the home that burn much more quickly, like the styrofoam in your furniture), fire-resistance declines.

To that end, no company is recession-proof or depression-proof. Very few companies have the cash reserves to weather multi-year down cycles with no new business coming in, which is the image that “recession-proof” conjures up, like a feudal lord pulling up the drawbridge over the moat to block out invaders. Business – and the world – are too interconnected today to make anything resistant for more than a short time.

So what should we be thinking about? Adaptation. Resilience. Agility. Instead of trying to bunker down and weather a storm, we go with it. We adapt products and services to what the market needs. We pay attention and listen carefully. We anticipate and plan with good, bad, and ugly scenarios. When we take a hit, we use its energy to pivot. In the martial art of aikido, the founder, Morihei Ueshiba, often compared the oak to the willow in a winter storm. The oak can withstand a certain amount of snowfall, after which its branches break. The willow simply absorbs and shakes off the snow, bending but never breaking.

As you plan for 2020, consider looking at a channel-based attribution analysis and asking yourself, what if X went away? How much of a gap would that leave? For example, in this example from our 2020 Google Analytics traffic forecast (forecasting our anticipated traffic for 2020), we blacked out social media:

What kind of gap would we need to make up if social media just flat out stopped working? We would need to make up about 3,000 visitors per quarter, using other tactics. That’s the kind of scenario planning that helps you build resilience, so that no matter what the world throws at you, you’re ready. Instead of being recession-proof, be recession-ready.

Don’t fight the storm. Dance within it.

This week’s Bright Idea is the compilation of our A/B testing blog series. Too many marketers just randomly test things without a strategy or a plan. CEO Katie Robbert explains how to do testing properly in this three-part series:

In the rear view this week, we look back at YouTube in October. The world’s largest video site, second-largest search engine, and a social network in its own right puts billions of eyes on millions of videos every month. What do the engagement statistics look like for October 2019?

YouTube’s Pareto curve hasn’t changed; the best of the best, the top 10% of video views garner the vast majority of all views, with hundreds of thousands of views per video and tens of thousands of engagements. What’s fascinating and worth noting is the change in engagement rates; the rates operate in a reverse Pareto curve; the smaller the number of views, the higher the engagement rate. This is good news for those of us who don’t have millions of fans on YouTube – there’s still attention to be garnered even from videos with only 100 views. Additionally, compared to last week’s engagement rates on Instagram, even the smallest YouTube video audiences are earning 25x the levels of engagement as Instagram.

Methodology: Trust Insights used Talkwalker’s monitoring platform to extract the top YouTube videos from each day in October 2019 by views, with more than 100 views, then de-duplicated the results for a total of 92,430 unique videos with high viewership. The data timeframe was October 1-31, 2019. The date of extraction was November 5, 2019. The filtering criteria to extract videos was the use of the word ‘the’ in the title or description of the video; as a result, the results have a bias towards those channels which publish some or all of their content’s metadata in the English language.

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

Media and Content

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Business and Leadership

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Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

Agorapulsa Social Summit, November 2020, Online
MarketingProfs Virtual Summit, December 2020, Online
Social Media Marketing World, March 2020, San Diego, CA
Women in Analytics, June 2020, Columbus, OH

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FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.