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28 Ways To Approach Marketing Your Business In A Crisis Economy

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ALT="woman wearing face mask and caption, 28 Ways to Approach Marketing Your Business in a Crisis Economy via Soulati Media"

In business crisis communications planning is essential. Having an expert public relations professional on board (ahem) also helps. Your business ought to have a crisis plan on the shelf collecting dust, or rather, on a hard drive easily accessible.

Here’s the rub: no PR professional ever developed a crisis communications plan for a business to manage a global pandemic viral mutation that inhibits the function of the entire world. As a result of this near global shutdown, many businesses are slowing and shuttering temporarily.

Has your business implemented a remote workforce? Maybe employees equipped and ready to work at home will be productive, but guess what? The companies sending moms and dads home to work will see disrupted parents managing children also sent home from closed schools. That means disrupted childcare, more toilet paper (uhm, yes, empty store shelves of paper products!), more soup and grilled cheese lunches, more spats among the kids or the need to transport the kids to the playground all while trying to work and be present and positive during meetings.

Look, all is not lost. The COVID-19 virus, will flat line one day and is temporary. While the U.S. may not know the extent of the virus’s health in communities, there’s a good chance that it will wane within a time frame yet to be determined (how’s that for running around the mulberry bush?).

28 Ways Business Can Focus During A Crisis

There are things businesses can do during an economic crisis of this magnitude. Here are 28 ideas businesses can take advantage of time and put it to good use right now:

  1. Do NOT reduce your marketing budget during a crisis. This is an opportune time to initiate customer campaigns oriented to education and relationship-building.
  2. Strategize about public relations campaigns during a time frame about six-to-eight months ahead.
  3. Look at the conference and trade show schedule in your vertical market and plan to attend. Purchase a booth; run a customer prospecting campaign to meet people in person (once social distancing is no longer the norm).
  4. At that trade show in #3, ask your CEO or other thought leader to speak in a break-out session or sponsor a session for attendees (that you pay for).
  5. For the trade show in #3 (and other conferences you may attend), pull your exhibit booth out of the closet, dust it off and take a look at what needs refreshing. How are the colors, is the logo prominent, and what about the message?
  6. Hire a facilitator to do a Message Map with your leadership team. This is always an important exercise to bring the leadership team together to discuss the 5 Ws about your company. Focus especially on the Why of your existence. (Want to know more about message mapping? Give Soulati Media a shout, and we will share more.)
  7. Revisit your Mission, Vision, Values statements and ensure that your company is on track, working against each of these important foundational items your company follows.
  8. Going one step further, explore your business purpose. What drives you beyond revenue generation? What purpose do you have for being in existence? This is not something to answer in 10 minutes. Take some time to meet with the leadership team and mull it over.
  9. Your website needs TLC. When we’re busy, websites hit the back seat. If your company is feeling a pinch during this economic downturn with fewer customers then take a look at every single page of your website to see if you approve.
  10. While you’re at it, click on every link on each page and ensure it’s not broken.
  11. Check all images on your site for the proper ALT code. If you don’t know how to do any of those items, then call for assistance. There’s always something you can do to freshen your website during a down tick.
  12. Do you use landing pages for campaigns you’re running? How many? How are they functioning for you? Again, this is a very good time to review all digital assets to ensure proper function, content, images, and success metrics.
  13. B2B companies do very well with newsletters to customers and prospects. When a business slows, that’s when marketing upticks. There’s no time like the present to launch a newsletter or refresh an existing newsletter and communicate en masse to your customers.
  14. Don’t want to do a newsletter? Then let’s go with more email marketing! You can create a new campaign to celebrate the end of virus fears with a promotion to get customers back in sync with your business.
  15. Hire a photographer (and support the economy). Here’s why: you can retake all the head shots of the leadership team in your company; you can take high-resolution images of your company in action (and use these on social media and your website), and the images can be used in communications with customers.
  16. Do you have a high-performing video marketing program with a YouTube, Vimeo or Twitch channel? During a downtime develop one! The whole point of this is “there’s no time like the present” to focus on things you neglected because of a time crunch. Video is the future, and the data are staggering about just how many videos exist on each social media channel. Don’t get left in the cold!
  17. Develop your digital marketing strategy. Look at all the ways you can live stream, bring people into a community, do virtual meetings and conferences, bring all your assets to the web, open an e-commerce site, and so much more.
  18. Plan a webinar series. In #B2B marketing, webinars are a wonderful way to communicate with customers. It’s smart to have a series of webinars with three topics scheduled over the course of six weeks. One of the webinars can be your product team speaking about something new alongside the CEO talking about the vision for the future. The other two can be with customers on a panel speaking about a product or service. When you invite others to attend, you collect emails and use those emails to develop your list for email marketing and newsletters.
  19. Focus on business development. As everyone is in the same boat with the current business climate, now is an excellent time to revisit your strategy to earn more customers. This is where your entire marketing team needs to meet and discuss ways to earn new business.
  20. Go on a retreat. No business schedules a retreat when everyone is chaotically working. Now? What a perfect time to bring the leadership team and directors together to revisit #7 and #8 and also look at new growth opportunities in the future.
  21. Continue your efforts with social media, do not go on hiatus just because your business has gone virtual. As everyone stays closer to home, they will spend more time on the Interwebz surfing. There’s no question you can maintain conversation and engagement with your audience.
  22. Survey your employees. A downtime is excellent for a word from your employees. Building a Survey Monkey provides a perfect vehicle to gauge what employees think about the state of the business. Offer a gift card to the employee with a novel idea that you implement.
  23. Build a customer loyalty program. For frequent buyers of your products, implement a customer loyalty program with incentives that bring them back over and over again.
  24. Talk with your customers. When was the last time you picked up the phone and had a no-pressure conversation with a customer? This would not be a sales call but a call to deepen and strengthen relationship.
  25. Meet with a non-profit. Do you have a volunteer day where your employees leave work and volunteer for a day to work for a non-profit? What about adopting a non-profit every two months so that some of your company’s efforts, like pro bono work, go to a charity?
  26. Review all of the subscriptions your business pays for whether it’s periodicals, newspapers, apps, photography and turn off automatic renewals. How many automatic renewals exist at your business? Then only after they renew, you remember you signed up.
  27. Develop a new product or service. You can make a new product or service as an e-book or online course for prospects and even current customers to remind them that your services go deeper than just one layer.
  28. Clean your email box(!) and clean your desk, your closets and reduce, recycle, reuse!

I’m sure that after reviewing this list, you’ll think of many other things you can do during a downtime. While this situation is hugely unfortunate, consider it an opportunity. No one takes time under “normal” circumstances to do most of the above, so why not now?

Greenpeace’s Social Media Win Has Losers

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Rainforest

If you were paying attention to social and traditional media, you will recall the Greenpeace/Nestle global crisis communications situation primarily in March and April this year. I wrote about it here; it was a fascinating study in public relations. (I would’ve liked to have been teaching a PR class when this was unfolding.)   

The issue became quite ugly quite fast when Greenpeace launched a crusade with a viral video accusing Nestle of killing orangutans in the rainforest due to its purchase of palm oil from a company in Indonesia that harvested palm oil from the rainforest and sold it to the likes of Nestle.

Nestle went on the defensive on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media hot spots and garnered thousands of hits to its page. Social media erupted against Nestle, as well, and Greenpeace watched their fireworks for weeks. In spite of Greenpeace’s social media win, the losers are still trying to uncover.

The accused Indonesian company from which Nestle and Unilever had been purchasing palm oil, PT Sinar Mas Agro Resources & Technology (SMART), ceased doing business with the two global giants as a result of the allegations. Unilever had been purchasing 47,000 tons of palm oil from SMART annually.

On August 11, 2010, this headline in the Wall Street Journal grabbed my attention, “Palm Oil Firm Rebuts Greenpeace Claim.” STAR paid to conduct a third-party audit of its estates to determine research “shows the company wasn’t responsible for cutting down forest and destroying orangutan habitat for palm cultivation.”

While I can’t corroborate the research report (Greenpeace is rebutting it), I can give you the skinny:

DAMAGE DONE, GREENPEACE “WINS.”

The public relations and social media strategy behind the Greenpeace maneuvers are amazing; and, they’ve been doing this for years.  These campaigns are the most well-orchestrated on a global scale; why? Because we live in an interconnected world where videos go viral within hours, and instantaneous, real- time, in-bound communication on social networks heightens the crisis to unmanageable proportion.

The tools are available to all the players except STAR. I have not done my research on this company’s mission, values or business philosophy (here’s a link to Business.com with some info). What I can assume is that people in Indonesia lost money and jobs because of this campaign and monkeys perhaps lost homes, too. World-wide, real-time refute via social media of the allegations by STAR were not possible, but the Wall Street Journal provided the company a solid foundation for which to air its side of the story.

As I weave this story again, I’m drawing your focus to the profound impact social media has all companies. Size Doesn’t Matter!! Word-of-mouth marketing is an amazing channel. If you watched the man in the video biting off the finger of an orangutan when he opened a Kit Kat, it’s highly likely you’ll never eat another (uh, chocolate bar).

BP, PR and The Fall

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It’s not too often public relations is visibly on the frontlines of a national crisis. When the client, BP in this case, is less than transparent and is deep into a situation (since April 10, 2010) with no immediate resolution and none foreseen until perhaps August, it is imperative public relations does everything possible to position a solution as genuine, train the spokespeople to be genuine,  and execute action-oriented and timely response.

In the June 7, 2010 Advertising Age, the story “Brunswick put to ultimate test as BP grows increasingly toxic,” references a global public relations firm that is most comfy as a financial communications agency and not an environmental- disaster crisis-communications shop.

Reporter Michael Bush references the good relationship with an early start in London 23 years ago between Brunswick and BP while suggesting the Washington D.C. office of the former is ill equipped to manage the crisis and perhaps its New York office would fare slightly better.

It was only a matter of time before the finger pointing began to swing in PR’s direction.

The work we public relations practitioners do on behalf of clients indeed includes counsel for behavior on the frontlines of a crisis. (Not sure why BP President Tony Hayward forgot his media training half of the time; was it due to pure exhaustion?)

No PR firm the size of Brunswick with HQ in London should manage a crisis of this proportion independently, regardless of the D.C. politicos on staff from the U.S. Treasury and White House who have foreign policy expertise.

This situation is similar to what happens to a past president of the United States. With all the earned expertise, he is relegated to the back burner to build a presidential library and author books rather than aid and abet the new admnistration. There are public relations agencies galore on the global scale with crisis communications expertise who can help the current situation with a fresh approach.

I am not one of these agencies nor am I a crisis communications expert who would even consider tackling a situation of this magnitude. (Levick Strategic Communications is doing a bang-up job with its own PR about this debacle; I’m seeing the firm quoted in a number of stories proffering counsel to BP on how it ought to manage this crisis.)

You can bet, however, that were I in the shoes of a Brunswick and internal BP corporate communications department, I’d scramble to invite illustrious public relations leaders to the boardroom to propose high-level solutions to this never-ending crisis.

It’s ludicrous local public relations firms in Texas at command central and the Gulf states have not been invited to the table to strategize strictly about regional people affected by this calamity who have lost their generations-old livelihood. How do you elect politicians? Karl Rove knows. You erupt the grassroots machine, one vote at a time.

Now that the pendulum has swung into anti-BP mode and it’s sticking, public relations is going to suffer trying to make change in this ever non-transparent debacle.

 For what it’s worth, BP and Brunswick, at this late date:

  • Call in the PR experts for some fresh ideas and begin to repair the damage that will take 10 times as long because your public face has been under water.
  • Invite regional PR expertise to the table to develop a Gulf States public relations campaign directed at the locals who live day to day off the sea for food and tourism.
  • Swallow your pride, cough up the dough, and tap the global PR community who work with oil companies on a daily basis. In fact, contact the Exxon-Valdez PR team for counsel on this situation. They’re still out there waiting, I’m sure.

And, if you’ve already done all this and I just don’t know about it, well, forgive me. Glad to hear it.

Media Relations and P&G’s What-If Plan

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Today’s post is a compendium of news about Fortune 100 crises. If you’ve watched this space, you’ll recognize these names – Nestle, BP, and Proctor & Gamble. Don’t know the crisis each is managing? Then perhaps you’ve not been consuming social and traditional media, for these corporations are in the news several times a day of late due to rain forests, oil and diapers.

To bring you up to speed, here’s the Soulati-‘TUDE! Nestle post. This week, my “Got a What If Plan?” oriented to the oil debacle paved the way for the next day’s post on diapers, rash and Procter & Gamble.

So great to see a sequential flow, and the only reason I re-introduced this content here is as a foreword to this article in Advertising Age “Inside P&G’s PR playbook: How Pampers Battled Diaper Debacle” about a behind-the-scenes look at the public relations machine for Proctor & Gamble. The internal team and its agency kicked into high gear at the onset of mommy complaints that the new Pampers Dry Max caused diaper rash and “chemical burns” on babies’ behinds.

For anyone in corporate or agency public relations, I strongly encourage you read this piece. It is a fascinating unfolding of a public relations machine in synch with product marketing, corporate strategy, and internal response to a brewing external crisis.

The story was written by Jack Neff after Advertising Age was granted an insider view of the marketing public relations team in action. He followed them for half a day to watch strategy and execution. I’ve not seen a story of this nature delivered smack in the middle of a crisis. If I were a stakeholder, you can bet my concerns would be alleviated after reading this piece.

In companies the world over, there is crisis. Social media has elevated these issues beyond comprehension and presented them to the consuming public on a silver platter. This trifecta is a textbook case for students, and I hope academicians and volunteer public relations professors are watching these three situations closely. There’s no better way to teach than by real-world example, and none of us are too old to keep learning.

Only one word of counsel for today:

It’s more critical than ever to shore up external messaging. When social media comes calling, one word gone awry can upset the entire apple cart.

Got a What-If Plan?

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As I read and shake my head, sigh and get absolutely frustrated about the oil spill calamity/crisis/disaster, I know the entire world feels as I do.

Heck, this crosses party lines, and if there is a defense team, they better have thick skin when asking for reduced culpability. The cascading effects of this event will affect marine life and industry for decades.

I digress.

More the shock to me is the alleged lack of disaster planning by all the oceanic companies playing in the deep sea. Just prior to the rig explosion, folks tussled about the final step; people disagreed about the what if. Admittedly, it’s been said BP was not readily prepared with a crisis plan in the event of the what if.

I do not allow the what-if game in my house. Children are notorious for, “Mom, what if…” In this case, that’s prescience.

Every company needs a what-if plan. In public relations we call it a crisis plan. In theory, crisis plans sit on a shelf awaiting a dust-off day. Crisis plans are meant to be revisited annually; updated to flow in sequence and aligned with changes in the life stream of a company.

Got a what-if plan?

Better get one…just in case.