A New World, A New Market: 10 Ways To Adapt Your Marketing During The Pandemic

As business owners and marketing executives, we are all faced with a new challenge and a unique landscape in which we must ask ourselves how and where to pivot our brand identity and how to adapt our marketing initiatives. Let’s explore some valuable ways to improve a company’s communication while being empathetic, sensitive, and hopeful in the overall approach.

Context is Now King: Be Mindful and Empathetic

Our marketing efforts must be more cohesive, strategic, and ultimately empathetic. Brands can either help or hinder our collective experience of what we are all going through. So be mindful of your core customers and what they are currently facing in their daily lives. Ask yourself how you can come from a place of compassion and kindness to care about their needs. Being raw and authentic contributes to your brand’s human appeal and is an empathetic way to connect with people. These are unusual conditions so put things into perspective. Images should not show a busy shop. Adjust your messaging, “Get in touch” would not be suitable now. Be personable and time-sensitive.

Produce Hopeful Content That Educates And Inspires

Don’t stray too far into political angles or touchy subjects, as a company, you want to be solution-orientated and diplomatic in your efforts, there is enough panic as is Employee-generated content can be extremely powerful. Show an inside view of what your company is doing and how they are handling the difficult times. Conference call pictures, a new skill learned during the downtime.

There are many positive narratives to this adverse situation too that can be focused upon; the Earth healing, a rise in community support, pollution decreasing, humans are learning to slow down and become more grateful.

Create Community Support and Good Will

This is the ideal time to be dialed in to your community. Send email blasts, or if possible, send out emails personally. Stay relevant and consistent on social media of what your company is doing to contribute, whether that’s donations to communities affected significantly by Covid-19, or giving discounted prices to essential workers. Re-Innovate your Product/Service

Seth Godin, marketing expert and author of the best-seller, “The Purple Cow” suggests going back to the boardroom (in this case your home office on a zoom call) to improve your product so that it is remarkable and ultimately re-marketable. Consider re-imagining your product/service, customer experience, and your brand message. Lowe’s changed their message to “Ready to help”. They also restructured their content with Youtube tutorials for “Home Becomes Makeover Series” to transform your home into better use during quarantine. Spreading hope and optimism and creating content around that for your brand is not just a good PR branding angle, but it’s a great collective purpose for your company. And it is also much needed during this pandemic.

Michael Sanghara is the Co-Founder and Head Of Growth of Spark Labs Marketing, a Digital Agency that specializes in scaling private health care clinics through the digital space. Their ethos is that ‘Spark’ represents their content and creative side, and ‘Labs’ represents their analytical focus. They find that their clients benefit from both sides of the coin because they help their clients set a creative vision that sets them apart while holding strong tension to the analytics performance of the marketing spend to drive a target ROI.