Your business’ status and how this affects your marketing tactics during Covid-19.
I wrote a post called, “Flex, Freeze or Fix – marketing strategies in the time of Covid-19”, that I published on my Influencer Marketplace’s blog on the 21st of May 2020.
In that post I spoke about marketing strategies. This post is about marketing tactics.
Last year I completed the Marketing Week Mini MBA in Marketing from the legend that is Mark Ritson. A few weeks back I was on his webinar about Covid-19 and its effects on business.
He proposed 3 generic stages for this Corona-time. This was Flex, Freeze and Fix.
These terms resonated with me:
- ‘Flex’ – where a business/organisation can ‘flex’ their existing capabilities.
- ‘Freeze’ – or ‘stasis’, where the business/organisation goes into hibernation e.g. to furlough and wait it out.
- ‘Fix’ – where a business/organisation can use this slow-down time to ‘fix’ their people | processes | strategy | tech stack | resources | deliverables | products | acquisition tactics etcetera.
How does this affect tactics?
This post is about Marketing acquisition tactics and how they could be affected by your business stage.
| Flexing | Fixing | Freezing | |
| Paid Search : | Pushing hard. Adding budget. Building out new campaigns. Running tests. | Reviewing your accounts. Reviewing your £CPAs. Optimising campaigns. Checking creatives. Reviewing landing pages. And thinking about bounce back offers. | Paused |
| SEO: | Continuing. Ongoing optimisation of pages. Pushing to continue with any dev backlog. Analysis works with a focus on landing pages’ CRO. | Taking time to do a technical audit of the site. A deep analytics review. Link profile analysis and Toxicity review. Rechecking of your audiences/personas/portraits, their language and entry pages. Competitor benchmarking. And, investing in new skills & knowledge. | Paused |
| Social Media: | Promoting posts. Merchandising lead offers and building communities. | Auditing what you have done in the past. What was the engagement and outcome. Benchmarking against competitors. Planning future campaigns. Reviewing tools and subscriptions. | Paused |
| Influencer Marketing: | Doing more. New campaigns and new ways to engage with influencers. Maybe ambassador recruitment. | Investigating your first campaigns. Finding tools/marketplaces and drafting campaigns. Conducting pilot studies on method, engagement, costs and what type of campaigns fit into the wider campaign plans. | Paused |
| CRM: | More of the same. Personalisation and custom offers. | Analysis of existing customers. LTV and RFM analysis. Creating customer portraits and how this could feed into audience understanding. Reviewing your tech stack. Looking at the most likely customers to target to aid the bounce-back. | Paused |
| ATL: | More of the same. Media buys are currently cheap – so do more. Maybe with CSR we care messages OR revised messaging. Push for larger share of voice. | Conducting a bottom up marketing acquisition plan to see if ATL fits into your mix. Consider spending early, take advantage of current rates to build awareness ready for future other comms. | Paused |
As a marketing consultant, many clients and prospective clients want to get straight into the tactics under the guise of strategy. These are the general tactics and my [generic] take on what might be happening at this ‘unprecedented time’.
If you wish to discuss a marketing audit. Working on your marketing people and processes, use the contact form. Will be happy to discuss.
