Business owners and marketers in most circles are thinking about getting the show back on the road in some form. As a challenger agency, its’ the role of Fireworx to identify opportunities in the market that your competitors miss.
The COVID-19 challenge is the greatest any of us have ever faced, but if you are reading this, you’re probably hoping to kickstart the plan for your brand.
If you don’t have time to read anything in detail before you get interrupted by a knock on your home office door, here are our three key tips for marketers:
- Review your strategy
If you’ve not already read it, please start with our excellent Strategic Guide to Marketing during Coronavirus blog found on the fwx.co.uk website. It deals with how you should re-evaluate your customer segments, in terms of how Coronavirus is affecting their mindset, as well as the perception of your brand.
- Bad news. We need two marketing plans
We all need to be creating two new plans from the ashes of the plans we all wrote just a few months ago at the start of the year.
- A short-term plan designed to react to immediate Lockdown opportunities or challenges in your sector
- A medium-term plan geared to ensure you make a fast start when a semblance of normality returns
- Make sure your brand is helpful, useful or entertaining
We’re all spending more time on our devices, and love it or hate it, social channels are a big part of that time. Make sure your brand is active and ensure your tone and content is either helpful, useful or entertaining
Getting ahead of the Pandemic
We’ve created a shortlist of 4 priority areas of focus that you can be getting ahead with during the lockdown.
1: Marketing and Media Planning
Few marketing plans will have survived the onset of the pandemic without the need for a review, depending on the segment the majority of your customers find themselves in. But how have our customers changed?
The key takeaways across the age groups feel logical, increased consumption of both broadcast and streamed TV, as well as other streamed media such as video and music. The big losers are the physical media channels.
As such the media recommendation would be to move spend from physical media into digital, and if you have a TV ad or a bank of video content at your disposal, then now may well be a great time to increase your brand exposure!
When it comes to spending plans, a lot will depend on how customers perceive your brand in the context of lockdown. If your products are ‘essential’, and you want to take advantage of increased demand, then targeted paid search via Google or Bing can be switched on almost instantly. Equally, paid advertising on the main social platforms could massively increase your brand reach to a targeted audience, though the caveat always remains that you need to keep a close eye on the Return on Investment the activity yields!
If your customer is ‘slamming on the brakes’ and your product is ‘expendable’, then you’re probably pulling spend where possible. In these instances, we’re imploring clients not to go silent on their customers, but to keep them updated on your plans and stay in touch. We’ll expand on this a little more in the ‘Digital’ section below.
Even if your product or service is itself ‘furloughed’, make sure your brand stays front of mind for your consumers for the return to normality.
2: Digital
Any brand that has been slow to adopt a digital presence in recent years now almost has little choice! As physical channels decline, digital media is picking up the slack and offering opportunities to engage that physical media could only dream of. With that in mind, this enforced digital adoption is probably a key ‘Darwinian’ moment for laggards.
If you operate in a B2B space, email and LinkedIn could be a gold mine. And a B2C brand can get in front of millions of new customers almost instantly with Facebook and Google Adwords.
Equally positively, our experience is that digital projects are continuing on a similar timeline even when completed remotely. With that in mind, you can consider bringing forward planned projects to get a head start once the market starts to bounce back.
3: Data Infrastructure
Unfortunately, there’s no real quick wins when it comes to data infrastructure! However, if you’re quiet, any improvements you make now can make a huge difference once normality returns.
Start with your existing data; cleanse and update your customer data where you can and get rid of anything outdated or outside GDPR. If you use Mailchimp, you could reduce your monthly fees by hundreds of pounds just by removing duplicates and opt outs from your data.
Once your data is in good shape, you can move onto consolidating unconnected customer data into one ‘single view of customer’. A good example of this would be merging separate ‘Prospect’ and ‘Customer’ tables, to give you a better view of the user journey from acquisition to post purchase behaviour.
4: Innovation
The opportunity to innovate will be different for each business, and each customer segment. However, there has never been a better time to try something new, to pivot and see how it works!
- Map out your end-to-end customer journey, across all touchpoints, and identify priorities for improvement
- Investigate apps or widgets that could improve the customer experience you offer through your digital platforms
- Revisit good ideas that have been de-prioritised in the past due to limited resource or time
- Get to know your customers through a better research programme. We use Survey Monkey to keep in touch with our customers, give it a go!
The great news about all of the above initiatives is that any improvement you make in the user experience of your product, or customer insight into its effectiveness will stand you in good stead going forwards.