Pivot Your Marketing Don't Toss It
I have a great book that I write down all of my content ideas into. That way when I don’t know what to write or talk about I grab my book, it never lets me down…. Until now.
My book has more than a year's worth of email topics, but when I sat down to pick an idea for this week, the reality that not even one was going to work caused some panic. For months, I’ve been planning out topics, themes, and ideas, and they all felt tone-deaf. So it was back to the drawing board.
If you're like most business owners, you had your marketing plan for the next quarter or even then next year all set to go, but then Corona hit and you aren't sure what to do.
We want to show up with a message that is relevant to your audience based on their current situation. What are the problems they are facing today that are different than they were just five weeks ago. How do you need to adjust how you talk to reflect their new situation?
What does a pivot look like?
Over communicate:
1 You have to show up more often than ever before. The sticking point is to keep it short and sweet. Communicate more often but with shorter sound bites.
2. Use Empathy and Authority. You need to empathize with the situation that they are in. What are the struggles they are facing now, and how are they different than they were? Authority is not to show how smart you are - but rather to be the guide. Show them that you understand that others are scared. Show them how you are taking precautions to ensure that if they do business with you. Show them you are keeping things clean, social distancing. Perhaps you’re accomplishing that via curbside pick-ups or to your door deliveries.
Create Connection:
While we have always wanted to create a connection with our customers and audience, connection takes on a whole new level of meaning. Connection helps people to feel safe, secure and hopeful. When you take time to do a Live on Social such as a Facebook or Instagram Live you create an opportunity for a different level of connection. The process of being on camera, looking square into the lens and creating eye contact. From the time of infancy, the way humans make connections is through eye contact. When you make eye contact with your audience (even though it’s only one way) they feel seen. If you haven’t done a Facebook live before, not to worry - it’s going to suck! The first ones always do, but you can’t get to the second, third or fourth where you start to get better - if you never get the sucky first ones out of the way. If you don’t have a large audience yet, that’s okay too - because then you will be well practiced up by the time your audience has grown. But just a quick thought - I would rather have 100 engaged and buying audience than having 100 thousand who don’t even know why they are following you.
Watch Your Words:
Words have immense power. Look at every piece of marketing you have in the works. It’s amazing how much changing just one word can have. For example, if you saw someone marketing to you “How to Build your dream team” a few weeks ago you probably wouldn’t have thought too much about it, in fact, you probably would have clicked on it. The reality is this week you probably don’t have any interest in building your dream team. Instead “How to Keep your dream team” would have significantly more relevance to you. The only difference in the sentence was to change the word from building to keeping. Both are great topics, but based on our current environment - only one is relevant.
Review your ongoing ads:
If you’ve got autopilot ads running, now is a great time to double-check the messaging on those ads. The last thing you want to be doing right now is to be paying for ads that are tone-deaf and therefore not going to generate any positive returns for your business.
Pivoting simply means taking a pause, reviewing and resetting what you are doing. It doesn’t mean tossing it all aside. I know one day we will go back to the content I have written in my book. I look forward to that day and pray that it will be sooner rather than later.
