The Coronavirus pandemic is unlike anything we have ever seen before, it’s a crisis that’s across borders. It has infected two million people and counting causing thousands of deaths and has had a devastating impact on the economy worldwide. It has seen thousands of small and medium business go broke and many more have temporarily shut operations. If you need to survive this pandemic, you’ll have to change the way you handle operations, especially marketing. Here are the basics of marketing during COVID-19. 

Keep communicating contextually

At this point, your customers may be confused and will be considering cutting down on all non-essential expenses. However, at this point, you need to keep communicating with them to ensure that you don’t lose business to more proactive competitors. Think of how your business can help them get through the crisis, and deal with its repercussions such as quarantine. For eg: if you run a gym, you may want to launch home workout videos to keep your patrons fit and also set up an email to convey when you’re expecting to be back in business. The most important thing is to keep communicating, but of course, do not be tone-deaf to the situations and always ensure your context is right. 

Restrategize and refocus 

Right now, not all your sales channels will be doing well. In fact, your sales team may have lower than usual productivity as they can’t meet the prospect to close them. This is when you need to set up your inside sales funnel. Whether it’s call, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google ads, find out where your customers are and get cracking. Also, you might need to shift your focus to certain product verticals instead of others. For eg: if you are a marketing agency, you’ll notice that your Healthcare clients and SaaS clients are booming while your retail contracts have slashed their budgets, you’ll have to focus on servicing your healthcare and SaaS clientele and acquiring more of them until other industry verticals start stabilizing. 

Double down on content 

Yes, you heard that right. Now is the time to set up a well-oiled content machine. People are frequenting social media more than ever and spending more time online. Traffic is booming for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and especially video-driven sites like TikTok and Youtube. Any content that you create now has a higher probability than ever of getting more traffic. Also, many of your competitors would have reduced the amount of content they are putting out. Now that your entire team is working from home, double down on content creation and address all the content gaps in your organization by producing evergreen content such as sales decks, case studies, blogs, surveys, podcasts and more. 

Review your automated communication 

Automation is amazing, but now is not the time to stop and review every bit of communication from your firm. Some automated content that’s part of your campaign may seem very tone-deaf and insensitive in the context of COVID-19. For eg: if you are an apparel company, now may not be the best time to promote your camping and hiking apparel and urge people to explore the great outdoors. Make sure you review emails, ads, social calendar, blogs and everything else you have lined up. 

Don’t decrease your marketing budget

Yes, you heard that right. While the pandemic may affect your sales, it will affect the sales of all players in your industry. Now is a great time to gain as many eyeballs as possible for your brand. Ad rates on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google are liked to be at an all-time low as fewer competitors are bidding for the ads. Lot’s of organizations will be cutting ad spend, this means you have more chances of getting your audience’s attention as well. Your ad spend will get you a much higher bang for the buck in terms of impressions now than at any other time. Also, since the entire world is on Lockdown and staying indoors, there’s a high probability they are online. It’s a captive audience unlike any time in history and this is the time to build brand recognition. 

What other strategies are you using to stay afloat through COVID-19? Tell us in the comments.