A marketing plan that will get your business through Long-Covid. I think there are few organisations, regardless of size or function, which have not been impacted by Covid, but just for a moment, let’s put to one side those larger organistaions with more robust budgets and focus on smaller businesses that simply can’t rely on money to chart a course through a market ‘bent out of shape’ by Coronavirus.
How do smaller businesses, often with constrained budgets and limited resources, implement a marketing plan that gives them the best chance of succeeding? I’d suggest concentrating on three imperatives:
- Focus
- Consistency
- Quality and imagination.
Focus
Flipping from one activity to another is never a good marketing plan, unless it’s part of a limited and planned test programme, but in today’s climate it’s disastrous! Now, more than ever, it’s imperative that you ‘laser’ focus your budget and resources on a smaller number of marketing initiatives, that you can afford to sustain, scale and measure. This will enable you to maximise return on your valuable effort, build momentum and reduce waste.
To support your marketing focus, first clearly understand what your short, medium and long-term objectives are and commit to them. To help with this, the ‘Agile’ approach now widespread in the IT world provides us with some useful pointers. For example, to build and maintain momentum and enthusiasm during a project ‘Agile’ looks for early wins. So don’t get too hung up about the big win that may take time to achieve, but build momentum from smaller, quicker successes; the high-value sales lead is likely to be a longer-term objective, but whilst searching for it are you collecting valuable contact data that you can use to scale your marketing effort? Are you building brand equity and recognition that helps ‘warm up’ later sales conversations?
Consistency
Once you’ve identified the marketing activities you want to employ, stick with them! Fuel them with shorter-term wins, measure them and enhance them, but don’t give up too soon in search of the elusive ‘silver bullet’.
Too many business decision makers are too willing to change approach too early simply because they lose patience or interest.
I’d always suggest starting any marketing initiative with an agreed timescale that you’re willing and able to commit to. This approach helps build momentum, gives you measurable data you can use to enhance your approach and valuable time during which campaigns can be scaled.
Quality and Imagination
Regardless of the marketing approaches you adopt, quality and imagination should be ever present. This may sound obvious, but when budgets and resources are under pressure, these values can be too easily forgotten, often replaced with simpler mechanism that require less thought, less time and are quicker to deliver.
In my opinion, quality is represented by added value; if you’re not delivering your target audience with added-value content then it’s likely to be viewed as low-quality ‘spam’ and something to be ignored. Not only is this a waste of everyone’s’ time, but it can seriously damage your business’s image.
Yes, there’s a time and place for simpler differentiating messages like price and performance, but these should rarely be used to underpin a campaign, rather utilised further along a lead nurturing process, as and when product or service clarification is both required and appropriate.
This is where imagination comes in, both in terms of how to deliver content in an innovative, engaging way, but also how to identify alternative approaches and perspectives that offer different ways of looking at an issue, that question and encourage people to think differently about an issue and you.
We all find ourselves in a different marketing environment in which we’re searching for effective ways of engaging with our target markets. Previous marketing techniques have not stopped working over night, but many of those we’re targeting are working in different ways so we need to find new ways of engaging with them; time is precious, as we all hop from one Zoom meeting to another; the attention economy has never been more valuable, which is why, I think, we need to spend more time focused on the quality of message, how we deliver it and to whom.
If you’re looking for support to help your business succeed through and beyond Covid, then I’d love to help.
