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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?

Lipstick, Virgin Atlantic and PR

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Credit: Advertising Age (adage.com)

I wear lipstick every day all day long; I love it and feel naked and drab without. So, when I read that Virgin Atlantic was launching its own lipstick, made by bareMinerals (another line I love), I was intrigued enough to write a shortie.

The announcement appeared in Ad Age “Creativity’s Top Five of the Week.” Here’s where I’m confused because the campaign feels more  like an excellently  creative PR campaign than a creative campaign from the ad department.

Look at all these elements:

  • Virgin Atlantic launches a new Upper Class Cabin and the inaugural flight from London to New York will be celebrated with a particular shade of red lipstick.
  • On the plane featuring the new elite lounge, female (why did the writers have to say “female”) cabin crew will sport the new “Upper Class Red” color of lipstick that matches their uniforms. The lipstick will contain “a special pearl powder to hydrate the lips of frequent flyers.”
  • Passengers on the inaugural flight get a free lipstick.
  • The lipstick will be sold on board or in stores that stock bareMinerals (I already know where I’m going to test this color!).

Now, my peers in public relations, does this campaign sound at all like an advertising campaign or should this one be owned by PR? Wait, I already know the answer; we’re integrated now and no one can take all the credit for a decent campaign, right?

But, still…

Using Social Media to Launch Start-Up JD Match

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This is a brief story about how cool social media is and how it impacts public relations strategy to launch JD Match, a new online recruitment site for second-year law students, large law firms and law schools.

I’ve been working with Bruce MacEwen, Esq., an esteemed lawyer and highly credible legal consultant,  and Janet Stanton, CEO of JD Match, who also are affiliated with Adam Smith, Esq., one of the most-respected online publications in the legal profession.

JD Match is an online recruiting site using a proprietary algorithm that will match second-year law students’ preferred law firms with law firms’ preferred students. The  start-up is designed to address the flawed on-campus interviewing process during which the nation’s largest law firms spend thousands of dollars to recruit the best law students from the best colleges of law.

For several months, Soulati Media has developed the public relations and social media strategy with JD Match. The goal was to earn a story prior to noon on Monday, April 18, 2011 in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog prior to the April 20, 2011 live launch of the new website. Three other tier-one outlets would be called and given the embargoed news release in the afternoon of April 18.

The rest of the strategy for the April 20, 2011 launch of JD Match included:

The primary press release and customer story (K&L Gates, one of the largest law firms in the U.S., is the first charter member to sign with JD Match) would hit PR Newswire on April 20, 2011, and the Internet press release would hit via PR Web once the site went live, approximately 36 hours later.

At the time of this writing (11 p.m. ET, April 21, 2011), JD Match has not gone live. Leading up to today, here’s what’s unfolded since Monday, four days ago:

1. An excellent story appeared in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog via Ashby Jones on April 18, as planned.

2. Above the Law posted a brief mention of the news on April 18 by 5 p.m.

3. The American Lawyer editor-in-chief declined the story only to have his reporting staff contact JD Match for an interview the next day (they had seen the Wall Street Journal Law Blog post).  The result was a wonderful Q&A with Bruce MacEwen you can read here. And, prior to this story running, AmLaw Daily developed a Facebook poll asking whether people think JD Match is going to change the face of associate recruiting.

4. The ABA Journal posted a lengthy story about JD Match on April 19. Its reporter had also read the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

5. 3 Geeks and a Law Blog published a story and pushed it out on its syndicated service, to Twitter, and subscribers.

6. A student posted a question and blog post on LexisNexis Communities about JD Match.

7. A question was posed and answered by several folks on Quora about JD Match on April 19.

8. There are numerous students posting commentary on forums and blogs.

9. Because the site is not live yet, a contact form was created to capture visitors based on the “early news.” There have been close to 500 people who registered with an email address requesting a note when the site goes live.

10. Many people are communicating and commenting via Twitter and Facebook. My challenge was to tweet under the radar with a profile that said “coming soon.” Soulati Media tweeted that way for two months with the goal of earning 75 legal vertical followers; we succeeded.

Here’s some other interesting tidbits about this story:

*No news release has been distributed on any wire services (traditional or online).

*The exclusive was given to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, and Bloomberg was disappointed they didn’t get the exclusive.

*From a single blog post in the nation’s top law blog, all the activity above has rolled out.

*Adam Smith Esq. posted a blog thanking its team who helped launch JD Match.

*More stories appear daily, and Google Alerts and Trackur are set up to secure the stories.

The wealth and breadth of exposure for JD Match without issuing a news release to the industry has been fantastic to watch unfold.  We’ve not seen a traditional story appear in a printed outlet; the stories have all been online. Once the news is formally launched on the wire and via online distribution, after the site goes live, we’ll see how we handle the next wave.

Meanwhile, follow JD Match @JDMatch and on Facebook and LinkedIn (still under development). (When you get there, please say hello to yours truly…)