Role of Marketing During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Hope you all are safe in this difficult time of Covid19. Across verticals, businesses are seriously impacted, and in some cases, productivity has also suffered due to various reasons. While the current state of business is in hibernation mode, it is important that we marketing professionals are not! We need to put in extra effort during this time to ensure businesses recover with little down time when things normalize around us.

 Below are some strategies that I am following, and I hope these might serve as a good starting point for your businesses as well:

1. Say no to transactional content: Content has always been king as millennials and gen-Z create their impressions of a brand via its digital communication. It is important that during this tough time, brands don't be greedy and play on people's fears. We need to continue talking to customers in novel ways. This is best time for marketers to focus on increasing the holy grail of marketing which is “engagement” and promote less of those transactional communication which often irks quite a few and can be perceived as highly insensitive in the current scenario. The best thing is to humanize the communication in a manner that people would find reassuring and compel them to start a conversation with the brand. Identify how your consumers are spending all that additional time and can you be a brand that engages them, converses with them and builds a solid relationship. Bottom-line become less transactional and more empathetic. Don’t hard-sell and show some support.

Some emerging trends are Bingo challenge, stay at home challenges, etc which brands should leverage!

 2. Re-evaluate, re-learn, re-target: This is the best opportunity to study your consumers on a much deeper level than you would have previously. Churn out historic data to identify and unearth different customer insights. Insights that will be actionable and that will make your communication to consumers more relevant and drive stronger action. This could be creating micro-segments that you hadn't previously thought about or stronger up-sell and cross-sell strategies across product lines. Also build stronger training programs so all that customer insights are transferred to every single employee in the value chain. Organize quizzes, games and maintain leader-boards to make this learning a more fun activity for your workforce.

This is also a great time to undertake a data enrichment activity. Get consumers to tell you more about themselves and what motivates them to buy into your products. Make the questions exciting and give them small incentives for answering these questions.

 3. Build strong immune and IT systems: These are both exciting and challenging times for your IT development teams as they can take systems down without most of the company creating much of a fuss. Build more robust systems to serve consumers better. Put feedback and NPS mechanisms in place so that your brand can better track, study and serve its consumers.

 4. Social Listening! This might be one of the best times to leverage all those social listening tools your digital agencies sold you quarter after quarter - Why? As mentioned earlier it is a good time to listen, track and measure how each of your content piece is playing out. Understanding what is being said can be the key to containing a negative situation or understanding how people’s sentiments are evolving. Understanding trends will also give you a head-start on topics that will help brands more create user generated content and foresee future crisis if any.

 Rest assured, most of us would end up becoming more efficient marketers at the end of this crisis. To our boss’s delight we might become more frugal and ROI driven in our future approaches. I am confident of coming out stronger at the end of all this.I hope this list has been useful while you are crafting your Covid19 crisis strategy. Would love to hear your thoughts on the steps you are taking to help your business at this time – please comment or message me.

Stay home, stay safe!

You can also find these articles on my profile on LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishekshettyisb/

Here is the direct link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/role-marketing-during-coronavirus-pandemic-abhishek-shetty/