Covid Impact on Marketing Strategies & Lessons Learned
Explain how your marketing approach has changed during Covid and what lessons have you learned? Assuming most had to refocus their efforts towards digital, will you continue down that route once the pandemic passes?
Best Answer
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This has been a big theme for us over the past six weeks and we do have a new strategy. It is too early to say if it will work.
Like most of us, we stepped up our content creation and content marketing from March. We also took a major conference workshop that had been planned for the end of April and converted it into an online workshop wrapped in microlearning. By chance, one of our team converted a planning framework we had created for a specific client, generalized it, and put it up on the website as content that one had to register for. This worked surprisingly well.
Our How to Win analysis (we use the Roger Martin Cascading Choices framework in a lot of our choice making) we found that ...
- Everyone has upped their content game, we are now in a Red Queen game when it comes to content ... "you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place, if you want to get anywhere you must run twice as fast as that (the Red Queen said)" ... and we will not win by churning out more content no matter how good it is.
- People sign up for far more webinars than they attend, relying on webinars will not be a winning strategy
- At this moment in time, people cannot make buying commitments, but they are making buying decisions
- People still need to get work done, and will appreciate people who help them get work done
- There has been a hunger for learning in the March - June period, but this has subsided a bit in the summer and we expect it to continue to ease in the fall
Two hypotheses ...
- Marketing is moving from content to conversation - conversational marketing is where we need to go
- Trust is critical, it is two way (and is built in part through conversations) and people want to do business with those they trust
Given all of this we are committing to three strategies
- Provide downloadable tools that help people make decisions and get work done - these tools also collect and organize data that can later be uploaded to our platform, the tools are designed to work together so that completing one feeds another - tool sets are supported by marketing campaigns and by follow up conversations
- Provide microlearning on our core concepts and on how to apply those concepts ... link to the downloadable tools ... charge a modest fee for this microlearning
- Generate more opportunities for conversation ... by engaging in groups such as this one, by building our LinkedIn groups (we manage the 147,000 person LinkedIn group on Design Thinking), by building conversations starters into all surveys, tools, blog posts and other resources
Anyway, that is where we are at present.
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Alyssa this is a great question. I am going to ping a few TSIA Exchange Community Members to get their opinions on your question. @Dan Lopez , @Steven Forth , @David Perrault, it would be great to hear from each of you regarding Alyssa's question. Has your marketing approach changed during COVID? If so, could you share how it's changed and some of the lessons you've learned.
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Like everyone else, we increased our presence with online sessions and webinars; and we saw an increase in attendance. However we also understand the limit of such activities over time so we actually also increased our level of activity at the account level, but driven by Marketing with a common content tailored for each of our customers. We have had much more success than usual to actually bring key stakeholders together within an account to spend a couple of hours to discuss their vision and strategy. So I would recommend to not try to go too wide, but actually use the time to reach out to your customers individually in much more deeper sessions than you would usually have had.
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