As marketers and a communication consultants we care about the follow-on effect the current situation has on our client businesses and their brands.
In an attempt to support and help we are sharing some communication tips in this special episode of ConFuzed.
Hope you find them useful.
Here is the transcript
Julian: Hello and welcome to another ConFuzed this week.
We're being all topical and we're talking about the current time with everything that's happening with COVID-19
What should you do at this time?
So looking at how you should approach marketing right now. One of the topics Mona we were talking about is how businesses are communicating with their clients and one of the important things we were discussing is how you actually communicate and obviously social media is a big chunk of that and how your business is going to be affected?
Everyone's businesses being affected. You know, we've I think you and I both have clients that have turned around and said we have problems at the moment because they're not getting to work from their clients and their clients.
So we're getting similar sort of rolling knock-on effect. One of the important things is as we've all experienced. I think you know, universally the information coming through to each other isn't clear sometimes about what they're planning on doing or how people are dealing with it, you know, even to the extent of whether the supermarket actually has toilet paper in stock or not, for you to hoard. So just within this time, obviously it's really important for firms to reach out to their clients with changes in schedules and being transparent about why they're doing it.
Julian: What else would you say is is vital to these firms at this time?
Mona: So from my perspective, I've really feel it's very important for brands and businesses to think about not only what they're doing right now, but also what next? Because somehow with the uncertainty it's important to kind of plan with whatever information we have NOW.
So rather than having a knee-jerk reaction and kind of releasing content for the sake of releasing it, this is the time to kind of take a step back and look at it and say am I being useful? or whatever messages am I putting out how can I make those messages useful
for my clients.
And as a professional firm and as a brand operating today in this time, they need to acknowledge that people's perceptions and priorities have changed for now. “For now” as they haven't changed permanently, but they have changed. So that acknowledgement is really important from a from a brand perspective.
Julian: Hmm. Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right.
I think the other thing is make sure your message is relevant and timely. So that you're not getting something that indicates you should you know, how about coming along to this conference? How about coming to this gathering of 500 people? All these things that could be lined up ready to go out that, you know, “bring your grandmother to this event”
is not something that will be happening. And yet people may legitimately think that it's occurring or may legitimately think it's going ahead.
So really…making sure that there's nothing that's on auto-release or having something that is maybe isn't the right thing to release it right now, needs to be talked about and gone through.
Mona: Yeah, and from that perspective, it is a good time to increase your internal communication with the other teams, with your marketing teams, or if you're a business owner, or if you are a leader in a professional firm, you've got marketing contacts, this is the time to kind of reach out and say look this has all come up on really suddenly, how do we actually make sure that we're saying the right thing and communicating in an ongoing way with whatever factual information we have.
What's the best way to do this?
Because this is not the time about things that you don't feel unsure if you're not if you're not feeling sure about a marketing message, stop! don't be compelled to release it.
Be it on-site events or be it your next promotion, your promotions have to kind of stop.
Because you need to take account and adapt to the change. This is a perfect scenario where you really need to reassess whatever you had in the pipeline and stop and look at it and go- “is this useful”?
How do I make it useful so that I can send this out?
Julian: Yeah, and I think what you have to do is to look at maybe just re-evaluate the whole strategy, is going it and say okay, this is what we were gonna do, now we're going to have to re-examine this for the year because life is going to return to normal.
So we have to think of the time after COVID has been and gone, when life's returning to normal and there will be another pop concert. We will be going to another sporting event. There will be something else.
Mona: Exactly!
Julian: but once again, you know, we will be able to do this and I think it's this is where I think you have to show the ability to adapt, to reinvent what you're going to do to maybe have an opportunity for a post-COVID sale of toilet paper because everyone's going to have a lot and and you know, it's time to do something else.
Mind you I was reading an item today in the paper, where apparently, whereas the rest of world are rushing out and buying toilet paper and baked beans, Americans are queuing up to buy guns! Maybe they know something we don't (laughter)
Mona: It is about adjusting your expectations and being realistic Yeah! being realistic
because it's so important right now to have that reality check in place and go,
Okay. What do we do? what's the value and what's the mission? What's the long-term mission and vision that we have as a brand and as a business? Is this is really about self-sufficiency at the cost of everything around us, no or is this about working together more or is it about collaborating more, be it virtually.
I mean virtual channels have opened so much more options right now.
I'm attending a 19-day virtual online conference from tomorrow. Anyone interested in joining in here is the link https://vid19conference.com/. I can pick and choose whichever streams that I want would like to be part of and these are speakers from their remote location who are logging in and talking about these things.
And it's so important right now to learn from the wisdom of the others because this is what the true test of the time is where we can share. If I've got something useful
and understanding to share, let's do this.
Let's do this virtually so that we can have that reality check in place.
Julian: It's interesting! And it's interesting how as we have been talking funnily enough,
my bank is just informed us of the important information that they're going to be doing
as the situation continues to evolve.
It's interesting that they put out a publication dealing with their own staff and what they're doing. The interesting thing is whether they will put out more information
as to what they're going to do to businesses that are financially impacted by COVID.
Because that's going to be another aspect is, how is this going to knock on to the business as far as finance and banking and everything else is concerned.
So there's a there's going to be a lot of impact of this, but it will… it will in the end pass, like all things do.
Mona: Yep.
Julian: Anyway, thank you for listening and I hope that's useful and I think it is important for us to keep a reality check and what's happening, but keep informing our clients and as we work out what's going to happen as weeks go by. Anyway, thanks for listening. So it's goodbye from us.
Mona: Stay safe, bye