On April 3rd, 2020, in a memo to its employees, Ed Bastian, the CEO of Delta Airlines, revealed that the airline was losing about $60 million a day. Unfortunately, a crisis like the one we are facing isn’t isolated to the aviation industry. Every industry across the globe suffered severe setbacks. In India, more than 150000 people in IT/ITES risk losing their jobs, and more than 120 million migrant labour are uncertain about the future. In the face of diminished demand, how can marketing executives help in selling?
The bitter truth behind all these layoffs is that customers are not buying — not just because they are cautious, but because they can’t afford to take such a risk. However, if past crises have taught us anything, the economy will turn around, which means customers will start buying again. In the economic recovery activities after the crisis, marketing teams will play a pivotal role.
The goal should be continuity, and businesses need to reinvent themselves to do that. In this process, the marketing department has the potential to assume the front stage — to spearhead customer retention and assist a successful business continuity plan.
In this article
Changes in Customer Behaviour
Changes in Marketing Campaigns
Reaching Out to the Customers
Promotions and Free Stuff
Social Media Campaigns
Changes in Customer Behaviour
What we do know is that the shopping patterns and the consumption trends will change, and remain changed, after the crisis has passed. In a study, McKinsey identified how consumers traditionally shopped around instead of sticking to one brand. Customers are fickle when it comes to brand loyalty, and marketers need to get ahead of that. It is important to be the top brand that customers think of before they start shopping around.
Loyalty programs and reward plans are not infallible either. Investing too many resources into developing loyalty programs can be pernicious to the organization’s health because customers tend to leave faster than you can acquire new ones.
Empathy is always the key. Sometimes the simplest ways can work the best. If you’re not sure how you can reach out to your customers, ask them. You can send out feelers through surveys, questionnaires, polls, open Q&As, or options to reach out to the company. If customers say that they want, say, more happy content, companies will know what to focus on to meet that requirement.
Either way, companies need to make their presence known. One good way to stay in the public’s good graces is to explain in a public post how Coronavirus is affecting the business and how the hours of operation will change because of the crisis.
Changes in Marketing Campaigns
Organizations must communicate beyond the business and ask their customers how they are doing. Activities like that are important because it shows that the business cares about them. In this — or any, for that matter — crisis, customers will have many questions, and all marketing campaigns might not be right then for the audience. The focus must be on addressing users’ concerns and wishes rather than using the crisis for advertising.
Due to the crisis, customer search patterns will definitely change. In times like that, search engine algorithms and social media search patterns will definitely change. Organizations must approach their customers through dynamic campaigns. They should revisit their existing campaigns to see if all of them are still relevant. The importance of dynamic campaigns to continue customer engagement can’t be oversold.
Organizations must conduct a full audit of all the existing campaigns, text ads, extensions, and other paid ad campaigns to ensure it still matches the changing search patterns and user intent in all search queries. Funnel focus should either be lowered or readdressed. Organizations need to reevaluate their funnels to check for your CPMs and CPCs on the online marketing side. In times of crisis, users take longer to convert. A simple audit will help understand how users are interacting with the ad campaigns and the ads themselves.
Reaching Out to the Customers
Marketers must prepare for the very real possibility that they could lose customers during this crisis no matter what they do. In the beginning, a lot of companies focussed on sending messages like “We’re in this together”, “We’ll survive through this”, “Let’s stay together and stay indoors”, among countless others. In the beginning, this sounded commiserate, but the sheer volume of those messages started becoming annoying.
The same was with the automated messages that telephone carriers played before a call got patched through to the other person. In India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) mandated that carriers do that. In the initial days, it seemed that companies were being understanding of the situation. But, imagine how it sounds when you have to listen to a 30-second recording every time you make a call.
Several companies realized that if they can’t offer their services, they might as well ensure customers still know about them. The focus has been on short term spending, which meant that marketing budgets were the first to be slashed. That is counter-intuitive because not all channels produce the same result. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and other executives must understand what channels produce the most results and reduce the funding to other funnels.
The kind of products that people will focus on will become important as well. A tourism company sent a mail a couple of days after a nation-wide lockdown with the message, “There isn’t a better time to fly!” Naturally, that struck all the wrong chords. The company’s justification was that the automated message was drafted a long time ago. In the end, all of this gets charted as marketing disasters.
As advanced technologies and analytics create performance opportunities, they are reshaping competitive dynamics in far-reaching ways.
McKinsey and Company
Promotions and Free Stuff
Demand for a product may fall, but it will definitely rise again. Even though it is hard to estimate the post-recovery economy, we can be sure that the companies with the best marketing strategies will emerge victors for a long time. Right now, however, focussing on near-term business results could seem obvious, but in the post-recovery plans, it can become tricky because most resources have been diverted to short-term solvency.
Several companies have decided that, to make their brand known, they should offer free services.
- Several coaching institutions have started offering free online coaching services for competitive exams in India.
- Cult.fit, a fitness organization, has decided to give people access to free workout videos online.
- Harvard Business Review has offered its coronavirus coverage for free
- HBO has made access to more than 20 series open for people
- MIT has made access its coursework across numerous courses for free
- Nikon has opened access to its 10 photography classes
- PornHub has given access to its premium content to Italy
- Neil Patel gave premium access to Uber Suggest
There are several examples of brands trying hard to remain in public vision. The Faroe Islands has offered a unique remote tourism tool where a local Faroese will tour the islands with a live camera. Activities like this are good marketing strategy because
- It creates brand recognition
- Keeps people engaged with the brand
- Generates publicity and media coverage
- Generates possible leads for the organization after the trial period
- Spreads word of mouth
- Shows that companies are contributing to the quarantine especially if they can’t donate money or start fundraisers
A marketing strategy isn’t enough if you decide to pledge money to someone. The general public has a short-term memory but is very sceptical and fickle while it lasts. Marketers need to identify who they can contribute to so that the public appreciates the correctness of the gesture. In India, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked for donations to the PM CARES fund, the general public and organizations together contributed almost 1.27 billion dollars.
But, this free stuff isn’t without problems either. While free promotional stuff is a good marketing strategy, too much of it can become too much for the public to handle — and that’s exactly what happened. The activities that many companies were doing got lost because of the sheer volume of information available to people. The list given above is by no means comprehensive or exhaustive. It is just to describe how different industries are functioning.
Social Media Campaigns
The key to a good social media marketing campaign is understanding how and when the user intent is changing. Marketers need to be ready to move resources from one category to another as the situation demands. Becoming agile is key. Organizations could need to reduce the standard two-week sprint or change it as the situation demands without sticking to a static agile framework.
Because marketing executives will be at the forefront of business survival, they should be ready to leverage the shift from offline to online marketing. They will have the dual responsibility of preparing for the post-crisis recovery and maintaining the short-term health of the business. As media consumption changes, marketers should understand how the customer behaviour patterns are changing too.
Consumers are likely to remember brands that they relate to the most. This includes companies that contributed positively during the crisis. It doesn’t make sense to send out holiday-themed messages or overly optimistic mails even if the intention is good. Marketers should use brand elements that are most closely related to the crisis.
New technologies and increased choices are changing how customers consume information, how they are thinking, and how they are acting. If there’s one thing that you can assure yourself will be constant, it’s that your customers will continue to shop around — more so after the crisis. The paradigm that the marketers are used to regarding customer acquisitions will change thanks to social media.
Communication with the stakeholders will also change as businesses use automation or leverage advanced technologies for operation. Going forward, social media marketing and the use of technology will be critical for marketing leaders. Spechelo has created AI-based voice-overs that understand inflection. That cuts down the cost of engaging voiceovers for different campaigns.
Emerging technologies can reduce costs, and leveraging this will help marketing leaders move marketing budgetary resources to where it is most required.
Digital and analytics-driven productivity improvements or cost-cuts might be an important alternative to traditional methods of cutting costs or using labour-cost arbitrage. In a study, McKinsey and Company identified that traditional cost-cutting campaigns only contributed to about 2 percent reduction while digital and analytics-driven ones helped in reducing upto 5% of the costs.
Changes in the digitization landscape have accelerated the wide gap in performance and capabilities between those leveraging digitization and the laggards.
Even though a business could be part of a group company, each vertical should tailor their messages according to that industry. It doesn’t make sense to send out blanket messages even if it is done in goodwill. People just need to know that the organization is not doing it for the sake of doing it.
Conclusion
As consumer behaviour and attitudes change, marketing strategies should be poised for a significant overhaul too. This could include starting from scratch because the diverse dynamic that businesses are dealing with negates any previous assumptions or accepted truth. It also means that marketing leaders should reassess what value propositions they can offer to the customers and then identify what products and services best match that value proposition. Things are changing, and organizations are learning on-the-fly as well — something they seem to be content to go along with
Very informative and well written piece!