Best Practices Guide to Marketing During & After COVID-19

There’s no question, the COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented “crisis marketing” challenge to marketers of all types and sizes, consumer and business-to-business marketers alike! You may be thinking, given this environment, is it even appropriate to do marketing?  The answer is an unequivocal yes, but likely in different ways. Intuitively, clear and timely communication is required. Customers and prospects need to know that you are still doing business, or how you are doing business, e.g., revised hours, online sales, shipping schedules, and safety measures you’ve taken, etc.

While we may still be learning a lot about the COVID-19 global health crisis, the one thing we know for sure is, it can either paralyze a marketing team or galvanize it to thrive. In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, that’s exactly what we’re seeing; some companies have cut back on marketing (in some instances, laying off the entire marketing team), while others are being more agile and coming up with interesting ways of engaging their audience during these difficult times. There’s an old saying that I think very much applies to our current state. Tough times don’t last, tough people do!

If you want to stay in business, you can’t stay idle for long.  Sure, it’s understandable that businesses would want to cut down completely on marketing activities. Being conservative feels like the safe choice when there’s uncertainly about how long the crisis will last. But we have to balance financial responsibility with the need to keep consumers informed and engaged when things get tough.In fact, long-term studies show that the right approach during economic uncertainty is to increase — not decrease —  your marketing spend. The last thing you want is to be caught flat-footed and find yourself lagging your competitors when the economy revs up again.