Re-wire your thinking

Now is the perfect time to hit the pause button, take a step back, and put yourself in the shoes of your customers.

As time goes by, behaviours are changing, as the lockdown continues some will accept and even enjoy their personal situation, others will feel frustration and anxiety. 

It’s time to re-think your strategy, think about your target segments, think about your short-term marketing activities as well as plan for the ones you’ll kick off after the isolation period ends.

Questions marketers should be asking

Here are some of our thoughts and questions that you might find helpful when scoping your plans: 

• Do you have older customers in your databases that are now unable to leave their homes?

• Are your customers likely to be working from home? 

• Is this a new way of working for them, or just more of the same, but now, with the added complication of having children and partners at home making constant demands on their time?  

• How can your products and services help your customers in this time of isolation?

• How can your team be more useful to them?

• Could you entertain them? Would they appreciate it? 

• Could you educate them?  What would they like to learn? 

• Are you showing empathy?

• How can you help to ease this pandemic, either in your community or using your technology?

• Do you want to be a good-news brand; or would an “uncertainty” message be more effective?

The new work-life balance

Workloads will vary now more than ever before and some will be inundated with more work requests than they can handle; others may be wondering if there’ll be any work for them to do from one day to the next. This will all depend on job role, industry vertical, service/product offering and geography.

Business owners might be delighted that their travel costs have reduced and that their teams are ready and available to work without having to navigate traffic jams, flight times and jet lag - this will have a massive effect on their cost of sale. 

Buyers may need to put projects on hold, or even change their business beyond recognition.  They may be entirely re-deployed to accommodate an immediate shift to secure remote working.

So how do sellers adapt? And can you really replace the impact of a face-to-face salesperson when closing deals? 

Using the technology

Going virtual could be the answer; suddenly, there’s an abundance of ways to communicate; Zoom, Teams, Webex, GoToMeeting, the list goes on.  The most important thing is that you think about what will work best for your customers, what will they expect, and of course, which platforms will your teams prefer and find easy to use. 

And with the increase in social media activity, businesses are struggling now more than ever to get their message heard through the online noise, and it’s more important now to get the tone of that message right.

So how do you break through that noise to meet your existing customers’ needs and create interest and awareness from potential new ones.

How we are tackling the new normal

Here at The Marketing Bee, our advice is all about revisiting segmentation and customer personas and taking extra special consideration of the current environment. We’re looking at how to group customers and prospects into new “lockdown” categories, based on the industries they’re in, their predicted IT spend and the personas in their buying teams. 

This helps to focus minds on building the new “Covid” go-to-market plan that meets the new and slightly unusual needs of our prospects and customers. 

With the right blend of entertainment, education and support and using platforms to bring out the best in capabilities we believe that companies can still engage with buyers and get deals over the line once this crisis is over.  

Effective marketing plays crucial role in this.  We need to keep our communications empathetic and informative and show prospects how we are working to help in this crisis – the brands that do this well will come out of this in a stronger place; the brands who do this badly may not come out of it at all.

Into the future

Of course, the situation is changing day by day, minute by minute, as we all eagerly await the lockdown relaxation and the discovery of a vaccine so that life can move onto the next stage if normal. With this in mind, our advice centres around constantly reviewing plans to focus on short-term objectives but remaining mindful about what needs to be in place to ensure success in the future too. 

If you’re ready to re-wire your thinking too? We can help.
Contact Sophy today on 07985 198386 or view our contact page here.

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