People that have been in businesses for 20, 30 plus years, all say the same thing. They have never seen anything like this pandemic and that’s scary. Nobody knows what’s going to happen.
How that relates to the marketing realm is that a lot of marketers don’t quite know what to do and so the marketing budget that they do have aside is just frozen. A large percentage of the marketing budget typically goes to events, conferences and gatherings, and those are all completely cancelled right now.
And so pausing for a while seems like a logical move to them.
If you are a content marketing agency and you want to effectively implement a content marketing strategy during Coronavirus or any other historical shift in the market, walk yourself through a few pointers.
# Who is your customer?
Did the type of audience you were selling to fundamentally change after Corona? For most businesses, the customer base is not going to change and for the sake of this discussion, let’s just assume your customer base hasn’t changed.
Then you gotta ask,
# Where do they live?
It doesn’t matter where they physically live. This question essentially means where do they spend their 8 hours of the day at work. Is it in front of the computer or going to live events? If they used to go to events a 100% of the time and they are not at events right now, where are they? That is worth thinking about when you come up with your pandemic marketing strategy. One you answer the above questions, you want to,
# Talk to them where they are
If they used to be at events but now they are on emails, you need to have a strong cold email strategy. You need something to be in front of the customers, to offer them content marketing services at all times. Then what you want to do is,
# Rework your highest converting campaign for a new medium
That offer that worked so well at conferences, you want to try that as a cold email. The print ad that worked so well in in-flight magazines for years and years, try it as a Facebook ad or a Google ad. You need to open up those new channels. Then what you want to do is,
# Learn and improve
Goes without saying, doesn’t it? These new campaigns that you launch are just the starting point. You cannot give up if one strategy is not working. You want to take the data from that first campaign, even if it was a garbage.
Start at the money; did you get any purchases from the campaign? If there were none, take a step back. How many replies did you get? Nothing? Take another step back. How many opens or impressions? Still nothing?
If there were no opens or impressions, you need a new subject line on the cold email or you need to improve your ad targeting. If they are opening the email but not responding, rewrite the body. If they are responding but it’s negative, rephrase the body so it makes more sense. And just like that keep working until the problem is solved.
