7 Steps For Marketing Effectively During A Lockdown
The coronavirus lockdown has meant that consumers have drastically changed their consumption behaviour. Hand sanitiser sales and Zoom app downloads are both up, while the advertising and hospitality industries are both struggling.
However, that doesn’t mean that this period is all good or all bad. Both extremes of customer behaviour change (as well as all the changes in between those extremes) indicate not just a response to this unprecedented crisis — but also what people think of your company, and your marketing efforts.
As we saw, despite soaring mobile usage statistics, some of the biggest and most famous mobile applications in India saw decreasing downloads and revenue. Meanwhile, a lot of relatively unknown applications saw huge download and revenue spikes.
What can you do as a marketer to understand how much your customer consumption patterns are affected by the lockdown, and how much they are affected by your marketing efforts?
1. Talk To Your Customers
The first move you should make is talking to your customers. What has changed about their life, and what has changed about their consumption habits.
Don’t mistake this for a marketing call — you are not trying to sell your product and/or service. You are trying to understand how your customers lives have changed, and whether there is space for your product in this new economic reality.
You may have had perfect product-market fit in January, and you may have zero product-market fit today. The only way to react to any changes, is to understand the changes!
And, on the off chance that your customer interest has dropped to zero, don’t fret! As Ogilvy advised in their recent report on how to use social media during the pandemic, this is the perfect time for you to build your brand, and not your business.
2. Determine Your Industry Benchmark
How is your industry as a whole doing? What are the revenues or downloads or other company-specific KPIs of your competitors? Are they increasing or decreasing?
Depending on the trends being set by your competitors in the field, you can more accurately judge your success.
Hotstar and Netflix are both seeing drastically reduced daily downloads, and you would expect other trends to follow. However, the former is seeing increased revenues and the latter is experiencing the opposite.
You would assume that Hotstar is just doing a better job of branding itself during this lockdown with that information. In reality, Hotstar’s revenue bump is probably coming from the release of Disney+ content on the app. That’s a one-time event that can not be repeated as and when needed.
As such, Netflix’s KPIs are a better indicator of industry trends for large OTT platforms (like Amazon Prime) targetting Indian audiences.
Note: Just remember, competitors are the brands that your customer could replace you with, not the brands that most resemble your company! Thus, Amazon Prime is a Netflix competitor, but Telugu-language OTT platform ARHA Media is not a Netflix competitor!
3. Set A Company Baseline
Not every company walked into this lockdown as an equal. Some are established, and some are unknown. Some are trying to get the public to forget bad PR, and some were about to initiate a large PR campaign.
What were your expectations for March and April? Were they realistic targets, or ambitious targets regardless of the coronavirus? What is your place in the industry?
Zoom is an extraordinary example of a remote work service growing because of the pandemic. More realistically, companies like Slack, Flock and Microsoft Teams are better examples of realistic growth in an industry that should theoretically succeed during a lockdown.
Take the revolutionarily open twitter thread published by the CEO of Slack, Stewart Butterfield. Butterfield talks about why Slack is not growing as people would expect; they had to figure out work-from-home themselves, they had to re-jig their user interface to suit everyone instead of just techies, and they had to change their business model to suit a suddenly accelerated market.
Only if you please realistic expectations on your company, are you going to be able to achieve those expectations.
4. Analyse Your Pre-Lockdown Marketing RoI
How effective were your marketing efforts before the pandemic? Was your strategy working? Were you on an upward trend or a downward trend? What would you have realistically expected without the onset of the lockdown?
While almost no one could have predicted the sudden lockdown imposition, it is important to see if your marketing strategy accounted for the coronavirus. That has been in the news since early January, and you should have been thinking about it and implementing a new strategy for it.
If you haven’t, it’s harder to trust the pre-lockdown trends of your marketing strategy. It’s time to build a new strategy for these new times!
If you had accounted for Covid-19, then look at how your new marketing efforts did before the lockdown. Admittedly, it was probably a smaller sample size than ideally required, but you can still learn something. How were people responding to your advertisements and offerings?
This lockdown doesn’t exist in isolation. Your users had probably heard of the pandemic beforehand, and had probably already started to change their consumption patterns.
Most companies operating in India would have seen a change in their marketing RoI in early March. You need to change your strategy to fit this new reality determined by that change in RoI.
You are no longer the same company with the same product-market fit that you were when your long-term marketing strategies were decided.
5. Determine The Impact Of Price
This is a simpler, if not easier, aspect to understand. Is your price too high or too low? Depending on the structure of your organisation, your marketing department may not be in charge of price positioning.
However, you can still change your marketing strategy based on whether your are promoting an overpriced or underpriced offering!
For example, overpriced offerings can take a different route and focus on branding. This has two effects; it maintains your brand as one worth buying whenever customers can afford it again, and it keeps your brand relevant during a time when most people would not naturally be thinking about it.
Meanwhile, if you don’t have controls of your company’s pricing, underpriced offerings can be marketed as a solution during this crisis. A brand that is willing to take the loss for the good of the customer is always a brand that is remembered.
Note: You can determine the impact of your price by looking at your internal sales figures, researching your competitors’ pricing to sales ratio in the last couple of months, and by just asking your customers!
6. Think About Your Customers
As a company, your priorities are naturally to keep growing. But, what are the priorities of your customers? You may not be providing the most important product and/or service to them today, but how do you stay at the top of their mind come the end of the lockdown?
For example, ed-tech firm Board Infinity promised a certain amount of revenue for some courses towards coronavirus relief. They gave people a chance to feel better about doing something for society.
If you look at some of the marketing winners and losers of the first phase of the lockdown, you’ll see the winners did something particular. They gave their customers what they needed, even if it had nothing to do with their product.
7. Do Something Different!
This is perhaps the most important step. We live in a different world, all cloistered at home worried about contracting a virus that may spread quickly and affect a huge section of our population.
This is not just an every day feeling, but an every moment feeling. Everytime you want to go out and exercise, you no longer can. Everytime you want to meet a friend, family member or colleague, you no longer can. Cabin fever is setting and affecting everyone.
This is on everyone’s minds everyday. This is an unprecedented opportunity to talk to your customers through a lens that every single one of them thinks about and understands.
The world has changed, if temporarily. Why wouldn’t your marketing strategy have to change?
Are you unsure of how to build a new marketing strategy for your customers during this lockdown? Please reach out to me at tarutr@getlokalapp.com, or at malhotratarutr@gmail.com.
If you are uncomfortable talking to me over email, you can DM me on my LinkedIn page or my Twitter profile. I would love to talk to each and every one of you personally!
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