Meeting III

Preparing your marketing plans for the Coronavirus

downturn
(Susan Hallam for thedrum.com)

Our businesses are all facing challenging times as the economic impact of
Coronavirus starts to bite. And when faced with challenges like this, it's time to
turn to The Godfather for that inimitable advice:

“Go to the mattresses.”
In other words, prepare your business for the long haul. Get your metaphorical
mattresses ready for your company soldiers to sleep on while they wait for the
battle.
We need to work smarter, and be ready to tackle the challenges ahead.
Here are five steps you can take to prepare your marketing activity during
this Coronovirus downturn:
1. Work smart to retain your existing customer base

2. Get even more visible in front of your target market
3. Focus on driving conversions
4. Measure, measure, measure
5. Test, learn, test
Five digital marketing techniques for powering through Corona
Businesses are looking more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze
every penny of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost-
effective way to deliver products and services.
Marketing budgets may appear to be a soft target for businesses looking to make
budget cuts. But a cut in marketing activity is a short term fix that is sure to have
long term consequences. Maintaining visibility in your market is essential for long
term profitability and continued investment.
And our customers are also watching the pennies, but they are still spending
money. They may be spending less, but we need to figure out what they’re
spending their money on. They don’t want to risk wasting a penny; they want to
buy the right products from companies they can trust.
1. Work smart to retain your existing customer base
Out of sight means out of mind. You need to keep in touch with your customers or
you risk losing them. It's always cheaper to retain an existing customer than
acquire a new one.
 Marketing automation is the lowest cost, easiest, and most effective way of keeping in
touch with your customers. I’m not talking sending automated email marketing spam,
nor am I talking about broadcasting cold calling messages to get new customers. You
need to be sending out personalised, contextualised, targeted messages to existing
customers who want to hear your news. You need to be keeping in touch with your
customers at every touch point in their digital journey through social channels,
through exploring the web. And doing this systematically and automatically will
ensure the job gets done, and will free up your more expensive human talents to
deliver creative campaigns that will add even more ROI.
 Content production is an essential ingredient for your tactical marketing campaigns
and for keeping in touch with your existing customers. Share the innovations that you
are currently making that differentiates your offering from your competitors, and
promote your good news stories in terms of awards and client wins. If you need
inspiration for a B2B content marketing campaign, take a look here.
 Getting more social means engaging in conversations with your existing customers.
LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook - these are places where you customers are reviewing
your products, discussing their purchasing decisions, exchanging views on your
business. Create a low cost plan for reaching customers at every point in the social
media funnel. Use these tools to listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking
about, learn more about your market. And remember, it isn’t about advertising – your
contributions to the conversation needs to be valuable and appropriate.
2. Get even more visible in front of your potential clients
You have to build your brand awareness and get more visibility, which means
driving visitors to your website to make the sales. And one of the best times to get
found by potential clients is when they’re searching for what you’re selling. You
need to get found at every stage of the purchasing lifecycle, from exploring new
suppliers to evaluating specific offerings.
 The Mere Exposure Effect is the marketing phenomenon by which consumers

develop a preference for your products or services merely because they are familiar
with them. Now is the time to explore low cost techniques that will keep your brand
visible in front of potential clients on a steady basis. It may feel counter-intuitive, but
setting aside an advertising budget for keeping your brand visible will deliver long
term benefits. Focus on creating high quality content that is going to get shared, and
reduce your budget for generating low value, low impact content.
 Update your evergreen content. Your business has an archive of perennially relevant,
interesting content that does not become dated and is still of value to your
customers… and the search engines. Revisit your content, update it, give it a spring
clean, with the objective of improving your rankings in the search engines.
 What other people say about your is more important than what you say about
yourself. Another low cost way of getting visible in front of a larger pool of potential
clients is to leverage the authority of other respected experts.
3. Focus on driving conversions
A low cost, high impact digital marketing technique to focus on is conversion rate
optimisation. Small incremental changes to the user journey will turn more of your
website visitors into customers.
 Social proof and post positive stories about your business. Revisit how you are using
your cases studies, recommendations and reviews at every touchpoint in your
marketing, and take the time to weave this content throughout your website and share
actively on social media.
 Customer experience is king. Invest in your website to ensure you are giving a fast,
personalised experience. And in terms of keeping costs down, remember that small
changes on your website will have an outweighed impact on the final results.
 Leverage artificial intelligence. Now is the time to get up to speed on the latest
developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence that will give your
business competitive advantage and access to the right prospective customers at the
right time. Taking advantage of current developments in AI will drive down your cost
per acquisition of new clients by ensuring you are getting the right message to the
right person at the right time, and reducing waste.
4. Measure, measure, measure
If you don’t measure, then you can’t manage. And if you’re not managing, then
you could be pouring money down the drain.
Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend. You need to be

measuring against your success criteria. You may want to measure sales, numbers
of lead generated, upsells, or referrals. Now is the time to ensure you have defined
your key performance indicators.
 Configure your Google Analytics correctly. Ensure you are covering all the basics and
that you are using the data to drive your marketing efficiencies. Do you have goals set
up correctly? Have you connected your Search Console? Have you defined what you
are measuring? Are you taking advantage of all the free data that Google Analytics
provides to you that can shape your strategy?
 Measure your social media ROI. When budgets get tight, you may need to make
tough decisions on how you are going to spend your resources. One soft option might
be to put the breaks on your social media activity. Social media can appear to be very
time consuming and an optional non-essential activity. But before you make that
decision, ensure you have explored how social media is contributing to your bottom
line in terms of engagement, visibility, and profitability.
If marketing budgets are tight, then knowing what works makes it easier to make
the decisions of where to invest your cash.
5. Test, learn, test
And finally, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the digital marketing puzzle.
You will need to be nimble and creative. Measure your success, and learn from the
experiment. Here are some parting tips:
 Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.

 If it works, then well done, and more of the same, please.
 And if it doesn’t work so well, then kill the experiment and move on. No harm done.
Be quick and be ruthless. You will have tested something, learned from it, allowing
you to move on and test something new.

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Preparing your marketing plans for the Coronavirus

“Go to the mattresses.”

We need to work smarter, and be ready to tackle the challenges ahead.

1. Work smart to retain your existing customer base

Five digital marketing techniques for powering through Corona

2. Get even more visible in front of your potential clients

 The Mere Exposure Effect is the marketing phenomenon by which consumers

3. Focus on driving conversions

4. Measure, measure, measure

Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend. You need to be

5. Test, learn, test

And finally, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the digital marketing puzzle.

 Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.

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