For any sought of company, brand marketing will never be just a walk in the garden but a full-blown partnership of various forces that can make or break a brand.
Wondering why so (hint for those who are living under a rock their whole life)?
It educates the audience about the current industry trends, and that’s not all; it further helps improve the primary goal of sales and revenues of a business, which finally leads to the creation of a reputation for the brand overall.
However, this whole marketing campaign needs to be extremely clever and creative enough to sell goods with the right brand awareness and be compliant with the current scenario.
Take in for e.g. the recent situation of COVID-19:
What buyers want, what regulators approve, and what companies have as a budget — essentially the economy as a whole — has changed since the pandemic began.
The most important aspect is no more competition, profits or even output but standing as a united front to fight it, because “the best marketing strategy ever is CARE.”
Stating that, marketers need to walk a fine line in this new marketing landscape during the period of unparalleled uncertainty and economic dislocation. Brands don’t want to appear like they neglect coronavirus, or seek to cash it in.
And that is exactly where all new marketing roads to strategies emerge; let’s detour and wonder these new territories that are relevant today.Â
- Device every action as a local respondent:
While this pandemic is global, its influence is more focused locally. Marketers find it’s beneficial to take that thinking into their marketing strategy assessment. In other words: direction from the center, but decisions on the ground are what is making the survival possible.
Every brand should create a centralized, open spreadsheet for all paying and owned market-wide strategies so that we can capture and learn from what is agreed locally.
An example of what we learned from this common context: Because interest in news is on the rise across the world, there are many more ad experiences in the news category being served.
We have to ask ourselves, “How confident are we putting our brand alongside news content in these cases?
“This discussion, and local context, would help us make decisions about the use of paid social media in particular.
So the mantra is- Local is the key!
- Re-evaluate continuously:
As business trends quickly shift, we as marketers are constantly re-evaluating promotions, innovation and even our guidelines. What we agreed two weeks ago today is not necessarily acceptable. In this case, the one constant expectation we have is that to only elevate brand recognition for the future.
For this reason, reassessing every possible touchpoint for your brand across paid and owned platforms, from video advertising to the automated emails that we send through Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are very important and crucial.
Re-evaluating it as per context, wit, CTA’s and anything that can come out as insensitive is important to amend.
Every day ask ourselves, “Is this innovative, or is the ad placement appropriate for this moment and in that context? “And if the answer is no, then we are pivoting. For e.g., a campaign running that tag lined as “out and about.” would be proven as blatant disrespect for society as well as a legal system.
- Collective approach as society over unique course:
If we have ever had a moment to come together and support each other, this is it. In fact, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said, “We feel a great responsibility to support this extraordinary moment.
“So wonder how we can benefit our clients, our customers and our partners — especially when it comes to our own networks and channels.
Through brand has its own “advertising,” whether it’s shops, websites or even social handles. Use all of your networks around to support wherever you can.
For example:Â take the YouTube homepage that guides users to videos from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or from other local public health agencies.
Be proactive and look at the social handles of your brands and determining how we can use their scope to reinforce the knowledge that people need now.
When the days go by, keep reviewing your own touchpoints for potential prospects like this and then later, you can convert this into an opportunity through being relevant all around the clock.
- Switch priorities to overcome instability:
Through all of this, we evaluate our marketing budgets through the lens of what is most important to our customers.
A guiding principle of any brand is to be helpful, particularly at this moment. And as people turn to information and communication technologies in these times of need, be conscious of our service deliveries through — Google Search, Twitter, Hangouts etc. — that may be more useful today than they were yesterday.
Move your paid media preferences to brands in the spirit the help more people obtain valuable knowledge or bridge the gap between what was once “natural” and their actual reality.
A great example is how Google is doing it: There attention is shifting to products such as Search on chrome as people need information, YouTube as people need inspiration and know-how and Hangouts and Chrome as educators turn to live streaming and digital lessons to survive and thrive.
At last….
Creative aspects, in the context of reassessing promotions, are necessary, and every innovative component needs to be scrutinized right now.
The sense of our advertising transactions needs to be carefully measured, from sound and visual representation to copy and keywords.
For every campaign or every tactic, ask yourself questions and try to come out as a medium of help rather than a strong businessman right now.