How can we keep marketing during a crisis?

Transcript

– So every so often in a Marketing Manager’s or a Marketing Director’s career, they’re going to encounter a crisis. A business crisis, a societal crisis, which that brand needs to respond to. And that’s something that we usually fall on to the responsibilities of that Head of Marketing, Marketing Director, Marketing Manager, whatever it would be. What I can recommend in times of dealing with crisis and responding to crisis is make sure that you’re absolutely clear in what it is that you’re saying.

– When it comes to a crisis, you have to make sure you’re completely prepared because marketing has to make sure it’s generating the return on investment. Now, many times you’ll be running campaigns that you aren’t really sure if they’re bringing a return in the middle of a crisis, you have to make sure that that marketing is producing a return. So the moment you hit that crisis level within your business and organisation, you may go straight to your channel, straight to your marketing channels and seeing what’s producing a return and what’s bringing in things like brand awareness. Brand awareness is okay to tone back during crisis, never stop anything, but performance marketing, things that are really bring in the return on investment, you have to be accelerating that. You see, your whole marketing should shift during the great times, the good times, the times where you, you can’t, you can just keep printing leads. They are the times where you should be definitely trying to grow, definitely trying to try new things, but in the middle of a crisis, it’s okay to tone things back. It’s okay to analyse, okay to restrict budget.

– The worst possible thing that I see brands doing is not being clear in their response to a crisis. That means not over-complicating things. If it’s a case of just saying what your brand standpoint is on a crisis or what it is that you’re doing about something that’s happened, just be absolutely crystal clear about what it is that you’re doing. And then the other thing that I would suggest doing is being totally sincere. There’s a lot to be said for being quite sincere and taking responsibility in situations. I think that when you see people or see brands, maybe not taking responsibility and not being firm in that situation, that’s where things are going to happen, that you don’t want to happen, or things are going to exacerbate, the problem is going to snowball. So what I would suggest doing is being sincere and being really clear with your communications in those situations.

– In the COVID-19 crisis and pandemic, it’s been a really, really unique one, really, really interesting to see. You see the high street has been affected, but the online world hasn’t. You see, we’ve seen traditional and conventional marketing such as billboards and leaflet advertising completely drop and struggle, but we’ve seen the rise and the boom of platforms now like TikTok advertising and Snapchat advertising and Google advertising. You see each pandemic and each crisis has its own unique flaws. There is no set way that you can get through these moments, but the number one thing you should be doing as a brand and a marketing manager, is making sure you remain agile. Because no matter what crisis you’re in, whether it be a normal recession or a global pandemic, being agile, being able to adapt and being able to be very, very responsive over your marketing spend, will be the difference of winning and losing.