Marketing Close in a Time of Social Distancing

Here’s something that you don’t need team meetings for: showing empathy to your customers. This is the time to turn off your regularly scheduled posts and to communicate as thoughtfully as possible. To be sure, it’s not insensitive to try to continue business while flattening curves and social distancing, but how can we as marketers help our clients get more out of this uncharted time? For starters, we can look at what most businesses already have at their disposal and help make the most of those resources, just like most of us are doing in our personal lives at home right now.

Email Lists Are Still Gold

Trade shows are being canceled. Your booth and interactive marketing tools will have to wait. So how do you reach out to those with whom you wanted to engage?

Email lists.

Email lists are good. Segmented email lists are great. Segmented email lists are uncut diamonds waiting to bring you value. A few facets:

• Work up an email that provides empathy, realism, and optimism. If you were at the trade show, you wouldn’t come up with a canned “Here’s another COVID-19 response,” so why do it in the digital world?
• Segmented lists also provide you the chance to tailor content so that it means more to those receiving the email, thus increasing your open and click rates.
• Bonus points for creating a landing page on your site that offers more information than what’s in your email.

Fortitude in Forums

Most websites have the CMS functionality of being able to add forum widgets to your site. These are great ways to create not only conversations but also a small community. The labor required to respond to the forums is similar to that of any social media platform, just on your website. The big plus is that you can start the topics and moderate the conversation.

Pre-recorded Videos or Walk Throughs

I’m reminded of an old NBC marketing promotion during the summer of ‘98 for reruns: “If you’ve haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.” Setting up some video content would be a great way to show your brand’s personality and cultivate a tone for your service or product. There is some upfront labor involved, but if you add tracking to the video and its landing page, you effectively have a mini trade show booth on your website.

Taking Stock of Your Brand Experience

Many at this time have correctly been looking at the foundations of their brand engagement. These companies look at the primary aspects of their consumer journey, like the checkout or main points of contact. Which is a great start, but ultimately if you don’t follow through to the rest of the experience you could be missing out on some of the finer points of your brand. Take this time to (remotely) collaborate with your marketing team and IT group and make a count of assets you had put in storage “for a later date,” because this is that date.

As all of us walk along this road together, our hope here at MarketPlace is to help. We want to create a conversation around both marketing and the industry as whole. We hope you’ll reach out and say hello.