Creating a marketing plan for challenging periods
As a marketer or a business trying to grow using marketing in today’s time can be challenging with the rising coronavirus cases in the United States of America and several parts of the world our marketing plans can be affected deeply.
That means your marketing has to be resilient and this is “not responding to crises like what happened during the lockdown”, it is more of adapting immediately to these changes and ensuring business continuity.
Most businesses have to plan to succeed, which includes your marketing plan. Today for your marketing to even bring results, it must be flexible enough to accommodate the changing times in terms of the following.
Budget:
Before now you could make a budget for six months or more for advertising spend, but now the budget has to be between one-two months, so you don’t lose out on results.
Change in buying pattern:
Prospects have to be converted faster along the tunnel because the market forces are not within our control. There is a need to work quickly by following up faster before your window closes.
Evaluate the controllable:
This involves finding out the factors that affect your marketing from the cost of getting a consultant, an increase in the ratio of naira to dollars if you pay in dollars to run Facebook ads and likes.
Be quick to respond:
If your business depends on online sales you have to ensure you are available at least 98% of the time to respond to enquires and sales, so you don’t lose them.
Focus will change:
As much as the focus is the customer, you will have to tweak your sales plan, which will take you time away from your customer.
In today’s time, it’s harder to move customers who have never known you before to buyers because of the constant uncertainties. Also, you have to careful with the messages you share because people are sensitive, and you want a pull strategy, not a push customer away strategy.
As a business, you also want to use data to make an informed decision on what, where, and how to spend because resources are little. It is now that you use data to make decisions such as
- Where are most of my customers coming from?
- How many are converting?
- How long does it take for me to convert them?
This data will allow you to know if it is a good idea to continue with a particular marketing plan.
Marketing initiatives to avoid
- Not nurturing or building a brand because we are about the now when in fact we should be thinking about how to stay relevant with our customers.
- Cutting quality because times are hard, we see some organisations doing this – which would affect the value or reducing service quality because you can’t cater for some additions would only backfire.
- Giving out back to back discounts and deals that will affect your selling price would only close down your business during a dark period.
- Dropping the price of your product, this would be a huge mistake if you are reacting to the market rather than responding.
Moving forward
A good time to attend programs focused on challenges at this time is now. It allows you to learn what others are doing and even benefit from their programs.
Product focus is also part of what you make a decision on; if you do have products that you can push from home and not necessarily physically attend to. Then you can have them delivered to your customers. This puts less stress on the marketing of other products that might result in a lot of physical movement with little or no results.
Revenue may not be growing as expected; however, other metrics such as getting your brand name known, increasing your followers and customers informed will help with long-term sales.
Progress can be measured as time goes and there are genuine ways to market during economic downturns that are low cost by;
- Attending Charity events by either sponsoring or supporting a cause can give your business a positive review, especially for small businesses like us.
- Flyers also work though old school can be shared around the neighborhood or business center.
- Business cards are also useful to provide you can have your details from the website to relevant links.
- Social media is also cost-effective, and with your mobile phone, you can create videos for products and upload them for sharing.
