Best Marketing Principles During a Crisis
The overall planning to reach a broad audience for buying or selling of a product or service and turn them into targeted customers is known as a marketing strategy. For any business to sell its product or service, there are 4P’s which play a significant role: product, price, place, and promotion. For a marketing strategy to be effective, these four components must be used appropriately, and the challenge is to determine the appropriate method for each area and integrate them successfully. In this article, we will discuss the best marketing principles during a crisis.
These four components are the basic principles of marketing. However, there are many other basic principles of marketing such as:
- Understanding the problems of your consumer and learning about your ideal market.
- Demonstrating the value of your product or the relevant service.
- Generating leads and building relationships.
Understanding these aspects becomes ten times more valuable as well as severe during the time of a crisis.
How Can a Business Deal With This?
1. Communication is crucial
During a crisis, a business should make sure that their entire team is well informed and headed in the same direction. After your employees, your customers need to be well informed. There is a need for communication with your stakeholders, such as investors, suppliers, and vendors. This is how communication can take place:
a) Define how you are going to manage the communications process through daily calls, meetings, emails, etc.
b) Identify a way to flesh out the details when dealing with a crisis, which can be done through an online website of the respective company.
c) Identify the communications channels for each audience, such as releasing a customer helpline number, email only for customer’s inquiries, etc.
2. Know your customers during the time of a crisis in a more structured way by asking the following questions:
- What could the customers be expecting of us at this time?
- What are customers complaining about?
- What new technologies or channels might be useful to the company?
3. Improve customer experience and loyalty through digital marketing
For a company to be successful during a crisis, it should be able to implement successful loyalty campaigns and customer retention campaigns by offering the best possible consumer experience and using minimal resources (human, commercial and financial). It is necessary to obtain new contracts. Digital marketing is well known for accomplishing this by accompanying the customer on all points of action, offering an elite multichannel experience, developing customized services and offers, or by providing customer support.
4. Highlight how your brand can help or contribute to people during the time of a crisis.
Brands exist to provide value to the products and services that help humans during this stressful time of a pandemic. Therefore, they communicate your benefits by clarifying your brand’s potential distinctive value in this cultural moment to share it. But what if your product doesn’t directly help folks deal with a situation during a crisis? Your brand can still provide value to people. Adopt an empathetic marketing strategy. For example – Identify ways can you educate, entertain, or inspire people stuck at home all day during COVID-19. Holding statements that cover the crisis and the steps your brand is taking to tackle the situation. The content should be empathetic, action-oriented, and should steer away from speculations and unverified updates.
5. Cost management
It is essential to manage costs during a crisis and identify its consequences in terms of lower operating budgets and lower investment levels. Focus on inbound marketing as it generates a high ROI for a controlled investment. Its primary focus is on blogs, sites, social networks, etc as it is a much cheaper vector.
