Louise Findlay-Wilson, Founder and Managing Director of Energy PR, offers her advice on how to continue to engage with your target customers during these uncertain times.

Considerations

When re-evaluating your communications strategy in the face of these uncertain times, there are several key considerations. Firstly, it is important to acknowledge that your customers and prospects probably aren’t interacting with your brand, or any other brand, very much at the moment. They are only shopping for essentials, not attending events, or bumping up against your company or service in any of the usual ways. As a result, there is a real risk that you will have dropped off their radar. So, you must be prepared to increase your normal level of outreach to compensate. However, this must be done sensitively. 

Method

The way that people are consuming information and buying has changed during COVID-19. The last few weeks’ have seen an increase in the number of people online shopping, social media usage is at an all-time high, new apps like Tik Tok and House Party have exploded onto the scene and searches for Zoom and Skype are up by an incredible 95 percent. 

So, review your channels. Work out where your audience is at this moment in time and refocus your efforts in these areas. If you are not sure where they are, look at your website analytics, conduct research into the behaviours of your customers, or talk to members of your target market directly to help you understand them better. Better still, do all of these things.

Collateral Damage 

With opportunities to engage with your customers and prospects limited almost exclusively to online, it is also important to take a fresh look at your social media channels and website – are they saying the right things about you? If they are off message or sound ‘tone deaf’ to the current situation they could do enormous damage to your brand that will prove difficult to repair.

The Message

The things that prompt people to buy or interact with you at this time might be different. So, your message needs to change. For instance, when selling business to business, the sales message should focus on peoples’ pains and how your product or service addresses them. However, the pain points of a business now, and therefore what prompts them to buy, will be very different from two months ago. If you are unsure how to identify the current pain points, start with the features and benefits of your product or services. Then ask yourself, in this current climate, what problem does this feature/benefit alleviate? Note it’s always the case (whether we’re in the middle of a pandemic or not) that if a feature/benefit doesn’t alleviate any customer pain, or deliver any customer pleasure, it’s not a feature/benefit worth mentioning!

It is important to note that if people are unable or unlikely to buy from you at this time, then your communications should not be a sales message at all. If this is the case, your messaging should be about other things - it will look crass if you continue to try to ‘sell’. 

To identify what else you could be talking about, think about your purpose in peoples’ lives. Do you make their house cleaner, their workspace more efficient or their tech run more smoothly? If so, communicate with them about the things in that space. Provide advice and share useful insights that enable you to continue to fulfil your purpose in their life without selling. If you don’t know what your purpose is then get on and work it out! You should absolutely know this already. It should run through everything you do – whether we are in the grips of a pandemic or not. 

Engage

People are looking for their tribes at the moment – the group they belong to. So, now is the perfect time to engage. Even if you are able to sell during the current circumstances, there is still huge value in sharing useful content that taps into the moment. For example, if you are a food brand, daily updates across your channels that suggest fantastic meals to create using standard leftovers together with your product might be ideal. It’s helpful, it taps into the challenge of limited shopping opportunities and gets your tribe relying on you more than ever. Inject some fun into these ideas by asking your audience to put forward their own recipe suggestions – you could even turn these ideas into a recipe book further down the line.

Every brand will have the opportunity to engage – even if your business is B2B. To identify these opportunities, focus on how you can fulfil your brand’s purpose and be helpful.

Measure, Measure, Measure 

Just because times are tough, do not use this as an excuse to let up on measuring the efficacy of what you are doing. In fact, measuring results is more important than ever during challenging times.

In Summary 

In order to truly engage with your customers during the unprecedented times, you will need to:

• Review your communication channels

• Look at your site analytics to work out where your customers are

• Speak to your customers to understand which channels are important to them

• Review your site and social channels – do they look and sound right in the moment?

• Re-evaluate your messaging

• If you can’t sell at the moment – or even if you can – don’t forget communications which amplify your purpose. Not sure what that is? Get clear about it immediately!

• Focus on communications that engage and are helpful

• Measure your results