Seven Things Marketers Can Do Right Now
By Amy Wheaton
It’s a wild time to be in marketing. Plans have gone out the window, we’re struggling to pull together new strategies and schedules, and messaging takes on a brand new meaning in times of crisis. Some of us are busier than ever, while others are frantically looking for things to do. Everybody is feeling a little out of whack.
Take heart: we’re all in this together, and this too shall pass! In the meantime, here are 7 things you can do right now to sharpen your marketing skills, get your messaging on track, and ride out the current crisis to come out even stronger when life (and work) starts to get back to normal.
1. Start planning your recovery efforts.
Uncertainty can make planning for the future challenging. It’s hard to think about building a campaign or a media plan when you have no idea when business will pick up or even what the current landscape will look like from one day to the next. But when it’s business as usual again, your clients or your bosses are going to want to hit the ground running, lickety split. They’re going to have a lot of lost time to make up for. The best way to feel in control during a crisis is to have a plan in place–and if you’re the one with the plan, you’re going to be able to provide a lot of much-needed guidance moving forward.
Now is the perfect time to think about the kind of messaging you’ll want to enter the market with as business picks back up. Will you want to launch with a big sale or a splashy campaign, or will it be a gradual return to your regular messaging? Have you noticed any trends in your customers’ behaviours that you can capitalize on when it’s time to move forward?
Set up a timeline (you don’t need to attach specific dates here, a simple “Week One”, “Week Two”, etc. will do the trick) and start brainstorming tactics and channels to help get business back on track while you’ve got time to do so.
2. Share honest content that resonates with how your audience is feeling.
“I hope this email finds you well during these trying times.”
How many times have you received this exact message in your inbox over the past two weeks? Not super helpful, is it? While the sentiment is one of kindness and empathy, your customers aren’t feeling well during these trying times, period. They’re feeling anxious, stressed, scared, worried, frustrated. If they’re not stuck at home, they’re feeling the strain of taking extra measures to stay safe and healthy at work and in their communities.
It’s not a great time to share generic well-wishes. Instead, think about how your customer is feeling and what would make them feel better. If they’re stuck at home, think about ways you can make that experience more enjoyable for them: can you share wellness tips, recipes, immersive video content, funky Zoom backgrounds for their video calls? Think about your brand and what’s most relevant from you, for them. Is it a playlist of mood-boosting songs or focus-building tracks? Is there a virtual service you can provide that’ll make their lives easier right now?
In terms of messaging, transparency and empathy are always key during times of crisis. People want their feelings to be validated and they want to feel better. Maybe now is a great time to open up your feedback channels for questions or input about what your customers would like to see more of. You could gain some valuable business insights while letting your audiences feel heard.
3. Do some social spring cleaning.
Audit your social channels. Get rid of old content, repurpose old blog posts that are dated, and cull your YouTube page. Spring is here, so it’s a great time to freshen up your profiles with new avatars, header images, and bios. This is the perfect opportunity to polish up your social–one of those tasks that it can be hard to find time to do when things are busy.
4. Update your website.
Did you get the spring cleaning bug when you were looking at your social feeds? Great — there’s more work to be done! Audit your website, removing or refreshing old, stale content, making sure your bios and case studies are up to date, and checking for accessibility best practices.
Run an SEO crawl of your site to ensure your title tags, meta descriptions, H1s and H2s, and alt tags are all in place and optimized. Get rid of the header photo you’ve been using since 2016. Maybe this is a good time to consider a full-on website redesign or rewrite.
While you’re at it, consider running the key pages of your site through a readability crawler to learn the approximate grade level of your site content. You’ll want to aim for a grade four or five reading level in order to reach your maximum audience online. If your content is scoring at a high school level, consider simplifying your vocabulary–there are plenty of great tools for this, and one of our favourites is the Hemingway editor.
5. Learn something new.
One negative aspect of the global pandemic is that most marketing conferences are being canceled or postponed, but a silver lining is some of them are being offered virtually for free or at a deep discount. Register online, hop on, and brush up your skill set or sit in on a virtual seminar on a topic that’s always interested you but you’ve never had the chance to learn about before.
Better yet, volunteer your knowledge! Offer to host a webinar, write an article or a blog, be a guest on a (remote) podcast — sharing your skills with the world is a great way to keep you sharp and help you make new connections during a time when networking events are nonexistent.
6. Review your email subscriber list.
It’s very easy to get into a “set it and forget it” pattern with email, but the workhorse of marketing channels deserves some love. Take a spin through your subscriber list to determine just how many of the people who have signed up to receive your emails are actually opening and engaging with them. If you have a high percentage of disengaged subscribers, this may be a great opportunity to set up a re-engagement campaign prompting people to start interacting with your mail again–and bidding farewell to those who have simply lost interest.
Review your last few sends to see what’s resonating most with your subscribers and use those findings to influence your email marketing strategy over the next few months. Consider setting up some A/B tests, too–experiment with different subject lines, emojis, CTAs, link colours, images, and more.
7. Make notations in your analytics.
When annual reporting season rolls around, it’s safe to say we won’t have forgotten about Covid-19 altogether, but some of the specific dates will probably (hopefully!) be a little murky. Make sure that you enter key dates in Google Analytics so you can easily go back and attribute dips or spikes in traffic to events relating to the pandemic. It’ll make it easier to tell a story at the end of the year, and your future self will be thanking your current self for doing this.
Extra Content
Wondering how to gracefully and respectfully return to branded-content-as-usual post-crisis? We have a webinar that can help. Register here.
Amy is the Director of Marketing with VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
