Marketing plays many roles for a business. It can help share information, promote the sale of goods and services, enhance awareness of your mission and vision, and build relationships between clients/businesses/consumers and brands.
It’s strange, then, that when your business landscape changes in a time of crisis, marketing is often discussed in stark terms: Do or Don’t?
Making decisions about how to proceed should be a little more nuanced than that. You have to look at each of your marketing efforts, as well as the motives behind them. You also have to think about your audience and their changing needs. It’s a matter of shifting the puzzle pieces around—and changing your own perspective.
If you’ve found yourself talking about your strategy in black-and-white terms, start over.
To consider how marketing helps us stay connected these days, imagine these going away:
Transactional Emails
The emails that customers automatically receive when they complete an action, like creating an account, might include verbiage that doesn’t exactly make sense right now. For example: “Stop by for even more great deals!” But you don’t want to dismiss these altogether. People might assume that their sign-up wasn’t complete or failed to go through. Take the opportunity to replace the old content with something short and fresh.
Promotional Emails
It might feel strange to advertise right now. Promoting products and services feels like you’re trying to get something from your audience. But perhaps you’re trying to give them something, instead. If you sell grills, people stuck at home might be looking to upgrade or purchase one for the very first time. It doesn’t help them not to hear about what you offer or receive a discount code; it helps to learn as much as possible in their consideration phase or save money if they’re already about to take the plunge. Otherwise, they’re just going to Google.
Newsletters
If you usually send newsletters on a regular basis, it would be strange to disconnect and go silent on your readers right now. They might get the idea that your business has closed for the foreseeable future, even if it hasn’t. You might feel like you’re short on the usual content you share, but this could be a good time to scale back or share favorites from the archives.
Losing these important channels would be detrimental not only to businesses, but also to recipients. Consider marketing a two-way street — keeping people connected.
Contact us to learn how to reframe your marketing strategy as a relationship-building tool.