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Digital Marketing Strategy, PR and Messaging

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Social Listening Is Key To Engagement, Long-Term Business Growth

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Social listening has risen to the top of the ladder as a critical component in program strategy for every business affected by COVID-19. Where before, you surfed social media and merely brushed against key conversations in your stream. Now, deeper dives into conversation provide the pulse of the conversation that not only builds awareness but also opportunity.

What Is Social Listening

What does social listening mean to you?

As social media engagement tightens up into niche groups and smaller streams, these “virtual dinner chats” provide meaningful conversation with a lot of emotion and feelings bared in more comfortable channels.

Perhaps you invite 10 people to join you in a video conference on Zoom, Skype, Whereby, Calendly, or other really cool app. You ask two questions, “So, how is everyone coping?” And “What are you putting in place to ensure you don’t collapse from stress?”

And, the floodgates open widely as people isolated in their self-quarantine want to share with others and feel the strength of community. During these conversations, your job as host is to find the pulse of the conversation. To help, you don your PR strategist hat, you determine how to address the problems with solutions.

Solving the issues surrounding COVID-19 seems particularly impossible. Therefore, building relationship and community solve the immediate issue of isolation. Within that relationship building, you invite everyone to chat about their business. What do they do on a normal business day? Ask about products and services they offer others on a normal business day? What tips can everyone offer that others can adopt?

Social Media Does Offer A Solution During Isolation

Social media, in my book, has always, always been about engagement and NEVER a one-way street. Frequently, many peeps lazily post on channels and rarely respond or share one-to-one. Connectivity with true humans softens the chaos and jagged edges of our own psyche.

And, if you don’t mind me asking, how is yours? Psychologically, COVID-19 wreaks great havoc on the psyche. Mine is suffering greatly with enormous stress as a self-employed business owner. I worry for my daughter working in a grocery store as a cashier. My thoughts go daily to my 80-year-old mother hoping she copes well through quarantine. Even more, shuttered businesses I used to frequent for my livelihood and clients with closed doors due to the pandemic contribute to my stress. That means I worry for the health of my business and ability to pay my bills and mortgage.

In conclusion, I am turning to social listening to see that I’m not alone in this global crisis. I am reaching out to connect with old friends and business peers. I am blogging more frequently and having fun designing Instagram posts on Canva for the first time. Will this help me bring in money to my dying business? Perhaps or perhaps not, but, no one said Rome was built in a day, right?

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?

Message Mapping The Philip Morris E-Cigarette

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ALT="ecigarette"

The e-cigarette is not my favorite topic. Nor am I in the business of supporting e-cigarettes or Juul as it struggles with decisions about selling vaping products to children. I am, however, a message mapping guru. This post is one of my all-time favorites. You’ll see data from 2014 when I originally published it, and you’ll see updated information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the dangers of e-cigarettes for adolescents.

Why Message Mapping

Over the years, I have perfected message mapping since my Chicago agency days. This tool helps leadership clarify their position to everyone outside the company.

Regardless of the size of your business, everyone benefits from the message mapping process. It lends clarity to products, services, company description, and more. At the same time, message mapping is wonderful for use by internal teams. Care to try it? I’m ready to work with you!

Cigarettes and Message Mapping

Cigarette smoking kills an estimated 5.4 million people a year worldwide, a figure that’s risen 30 percent over the last 20 years, according to Forbes, “The Future of Smoking Lies Somewhere in Here,” June 16, 2014.

Then why is Philip Morris International (PMI), the subject of the story, thick in development of next-gen cancer sticks, vaping devices with new flavoring and a heat-not-burn technology with all the perks and pizazz of nicotine for the addicted?

At a recent March 2019 conference, Philip Morris and Altria are not only enduring the negatives against smoking and e-cigarettes but are actually successful.

Why E-Cigarettes and Smoking?

The answer is simple. Cigarettes, e-cigarettes and even vaping are a lucrative business for the global giant. The world over, intense taxation on cigarettes plagues smokers. PMI paid $48.8 billion of $80 billion in revenue to the tax man in 2013. Smokers are eager to adopt a new, “healthier” alternative to cancer-breathing smoke sticks. We know now that healthier is not the word to describe e-cigarettes and vaping. In fact, vaping kills, according to the latest lung disease research.

To give you more of a sense of how widespread smoking remains, 6 trillion cigarettes are sold globally each year. “Serbia and Eastern European nations out smoke the competition despite having tax rates over 50 percent,” according to Forbes.

PMI spends $650 million on research to develop an e-cigarette (and various prototypes) with a battery heater in black that looks like an old-fashioned cigarette holder. Tobacco is heated within a paper cartridge with a filter just below the burning point. The smoker gets the nicotine and flavors with “fewer harmful combustion by-products like benzene and tar.”

The Philip Morris Quandary

This Forbes story from June 16, 2014 grabs you from the first paragraph. How many nonsmokers gag when confronted with the offensive exhalations from peers who smoke? And, how many smokers secretly wish there was an alternative to their bad habit and the opportunity to be welcome in public?

That puts Philip Morris International (and its industry peers) in a particularly challenging global position. Does it continue to output cancer-causing smokes to the tune of 6 trillion annually, or does it do the right thing to try to find a healthier alternative?

PMI is well on its way to the latter; however, hold your applause. In the last 10 years, 540 million people have died from cigarette smoking (do the math from the first sentence).

Still, it’s an intriguing public relations challenge with high levels of complexity. Let’s see how a PR team would craft a message map for Philip Morris and its new e-cigarette. I don’t work for any company associated with cigarettes; however, this is the recommended approach to a message mapping challenge for the global behemoth.

ALT="Message Mapping book by Soulati" E-Cigarette Message Map for Philip Morris

The first step in developing a message map for PMI about its vaping device is to look at the categories required (there may be others):

  • Research
  • Product
  • Investment/Earnings
  • Consumers
  • Competition
  • Health
  • Industry

Therefore, I’ll work backward from the Forbes article to map the messages within each category. The end result, hopefully, is your better understanding about the go-to-market strategy for messaging a product like an e-cigarette. Mostly, I circled relevant facts throughout the article pertaining to PMI, other industry sources as well as competitive data.

While the published article does not match the message map PMI would create for its e-cigarette, it’s pretty darn close. You’ll get a solid sense of why message maps are important for your own business, product or service.

So, what I’m doing is to highlight themes about e-cigarettes and associated “messages” from the published article in Forbes about Philip Morris. All of these statements are taken directly from Forbes. The attribution and wording are exact and credited to Forbes. For the sake of length, I’ll only include a few in each category. Ready?

Research

  • Studies in various countries show that e-cigarettes have close to 100% consumer recognition among smokers. Because of that, 20% to 50% have tried them at least once. However, less than 10% use them regularly.
  • Because filters, says Calantzopoulos, simply can’t remove the dangerous by-products of burning tobacco that cause lung cancer emphysema and heart disease.
  • While PMI sells its products, it’s also conducting tests in Petri dishes and on human cells using the cutting-edge technique known as systems biology to try to assess how the new devices affect known pathways to cancer and other smoking-related diseases.

The Product

  • The first new model is an electronic device that looks like an old-fashioned cigarette holder, which heats tobacco to just below the burning point to release the nicotine and flavor of tobacco with fewer harmful combustion by-products like benzene and tar.
  • Consumers will try a thin black device that holds a paper tube, while a software-controlled, rechargeable heating element raises the temperature to almost 400 degrees, creating a vapor from the tobacco to release nicotine and flavors. The smoker exhales vapor that quickly dissipates in the air.
  • In 2002, PMI gave up on developing a safer version of the combustible cigarette.

Investment/Earnings

  • Six trillion cigarettes are sold globally each year; if PMI’s tobacco heater attracts even a 5% share, that would boost profits, already a hefty $8.6 billion, by more than $1 billion a year.
  • PMI has invested $650 million with the current expenditure ramping up past $200 million annually to try to help the world’s smokers.
  • Of PMI’s $80 billion in revenue last year, $48.8 billion went to taxing authorities.
  • PMI has doubled earnings every 10 years since Andre Calantzopoulos, CEO, joined the firm in 1985, and investors have earned 122% since the spinoff in 2008, compared with 67% for the S&P 500 index.

Consumers

  • PMI is betting that smokers prefer the taste of real tobacco over e-cigarettes.
  • PMI is trying to prove to regulators that its great new product won’t actually attract new customers.
  • Consumers buy 6 trillion cigarettes worldwide each year.
  • Serbia and Eastern European nations outsmoke the competition despite having cigarette tax rates over 50%.

Competition

  • Lorillard is all-in on e-cigarettes, having purchased Blu, now one of the largest U.S. brands, for $135 million in 2012.
  • Altria, PMI’s former U.S. parent, is test-marketing MarkTen e-cigs.
  • Reynolds American introduced Premier in 1988 but withdrew it months later after the American Medical Association urged the FDA to ban it. Reynolds tried again with Eclipse and was sued by the Vermont attorney general.

Health

  • “These products can bring the biggest single benefit in a short period of time, in terms of public health,” said Andre Calantzopoulos, PMI CEO.
  • Cigarettes smoking kills an estimated 5.4 million people a year worldwide, a figure that’s risen 30% over the past 20 years.
  • If PMI proves successful, the new products will surely save the lives of tens of thousands of their customers. But they could also make smoking less scary to those who don’t smoke, creating new nicotine addicts.
  • If the product is 80% safer and used by the 20% of U.S. adults who smoke, that’s a public health win.

Industry

  • The tobacco analyst at Wells Fargo believes consumption of e-cigs and other delivery devices deemed safer could eclipse conventional cigarettes by 2030.
  • Past president of the American Lung Association supports e-cigarettes as a way to wean smokers off their favorite smokes.
  • Anti-tobacco activist with University of California thinks the FDA should block new tobacco products until cigarette manufacturers remove traditional cigs from the market.
  • American Lung Association says,”The most heavily marketed brands by the major tobacco companies are the most heavily used ones by kids.”

The Message Map

  • Imagine how many message maps Philip Morris International has for its business units. Would you say about two dozen?
  • Because messaging is critical, ensure your company has one! First, get a corporate map done to fuel your communications strategy. Just like the exercise above, a message map bring clarity for the entire leadership and marketing teams. It also forms the basis of factual storytelling, just like the exercise above.
  • On your growth continuum, use a message map as the first tool map out strategy and message from the outside-in.

About the Author

This article originally appeared August 26, 2014 on Soulati.com, “Soulati-‘TUDE!” by Jayme Soulati, a message mapping master and public relations marketer.

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