8-steps marketing strategy for B2B companies to survive despite a war
“Nobody taught me to lead a marketing team in case of war,” revelations of B2B marketer 💙💛
Nobody taught me to lead a marketing team in case of war; there were no courses, no certifications. I didn’t know how to communicate, run campaigns, establish the KPIs, or evaluate the insights when there are not any benchmarks around.
Frozen market 🥶, no budget and a fully distributed team… that is all I had. Moreover, I had to inspire and support them when I was also absolutely broken and lost.
We all are on an emotional rollercoaster 🤪, that is normal for wartime; we are balancing between super motivation and absolutely powerlessness from hour to hour
We were “on hold” for about 2 weeks. The only belief, I followed, was: “it does not matter where is the end of the war, just do something.”
We looked like frogs in the milk pail 🐸🥛; we were churning the milk into butter to jump out. So, I’ve got together all the points we did and were guided by.
I hope nobody will find them helpful, but now, in 84 days, they look like a wholly meaningful tactic plan.
Call a spade a spade, and don’t allow ambiguity 🙏
1. Be clear and understandable in your communication, call a spade a spade, and don’t allow ambiguity. We call war “war” and “fully invasion”, russians “aggressors” and “occupants”. We don’t play the corporate communications games (as most do), balancing between guidelines and truth, when our homes and closest ones are under the bombing. Likewise, we don’t wish peace, we wish victory (for us, Ukrainians, these words have different meanings). I am convinced, our customers would not like to read and hear our prevarication. There is one step from respect to losing trust.
2. Initiate the official statement of the company ASAP. Our Konica Minolta was among the first Ukrainian subsidiaries of international companies, which became transparent in our intents and actions regarding business operations in russia. We did not have to make excuses, as others did after pushing them by our governance. Fortunately, we are close enough to the international communication team and got immediate support and statement. I love them for that and everything they did for us.
It doesn’t matter how much you are good at event management when your prospect googles services from a bomb shelter 💣
3. Switch focus in communications from prospects to current customers. News, updates, guides, motivating stories — we provide them with everything relevant to our partnership and engage them to co-create content to strengthen our presence. Of course, nothing can substitute the direct communications of sales reps, but not everyone is open to talking or texting. When we got back to work, we created something like a manifesto; we have been guided by it in communications for 84 days.
4. Analyze demand to adapt your portfolio as much as you can. Firstly, we evaluated our current products and services and repacked a few solutions in accordance with trends. Secondly, we immediately attracted new partners to provide necessary, but new for us, expertise to our customers. We switched our focus from demand generation and lead nurturing to the processing of “bottom of the funnel” prospects.
“Eat the frogs 🐸”. Ukraine will win, war will end, so we will have not enough time to handle all gaps in our marketing schedule again 🤷♀️
5. Educate the team. Our team still had a few skill gaps, but had not any budget to outsource others. So, for now, I decided to nurture absolutely convergent marketing specialists. The war blurred the shapes, it doesn’t matter how much you are good at event management when your prospects google services from a bomb shelter. We have scheduled a set of “knowledge sharing sessions” to make this process more engaged. We launched the competition to complete Marketo certification. So… I believe, any crisis is the right time to invest your efforts to improve yourself. War will end, and I will have a more skilled team. Do we have to postpone that? 🙅♂️
6. Adapt all your messages and CTAs to the circumstances. We shifted attention only to the relevant challenges, which our company can handle. People don’t like you to communicate as nothing happens. Don’t be afraid to text the word “war” in each social media post, don’t stop joking and using memes, and join flash mobs. Yes, yes, we also used pink hat after Eurovision 2022 and Vitaliy Kim’s quotes in our creatives.
We looked like frogs in the milk pail 🐸🥛; we were churning the milk into butter to jump out
7. Don’t postpone strengthening the brand and “eat the frogs”. Ukraine will win, war will end, so we will have not enough time to handle all gaps in our marketing schedule again. We didn’t waste a time: fixed all SEO mistakes, rewrote a list of content, redesigned key website pages and finally find the time for content syndication. Likewise, we are launching most scheduled brand campaigns (sure, we repacked and adapted them according to my points above).
8. Build warmer team relationships 💛 but stricter management. We all are on an emotional rollercoaster, that is normal for wartime; we are balancing between super motivation and absolutely powerlessness from hour to hour. To keep the team’s productivity, I had to rethink my desire for flexibility in the work. Early morning daily standups, daily schedules, weekly reports and process KPIs keep us on our toes. At the same time, since the beginning of the war, we get closer than ever before. “How many explosions have you heard? Are you ok?” that is a common text in our chat at night during an air raid.
I’m uncertain if that is the only right guide. We can evaluate it later, but now…
Does anybody have something to add?
