Marketing Strategies During COVID-19 Pandemic

Many of our clients have asked us what they should be doing during the shutdown related to the COVID-19 pandemic. To get an answer I reached out to a few of my contacts to get their point of view. One good friend of mine, whom I respect, answered by saying, “It depends.” 

Honestly, that is a good answer because there are so many variables, both personal and professional. A few of the forces that will influence the strategy you take for marketing will depend on your industry, your cash flow, your time, and how you think the market will respond. 

Ultimately, your strategy boils down to whether or not you want to just maintain market share or, as some are doing, try to gain market share. One of my contacts suggested that this “crisis” was actually a chance to gain market share - what he called an “unfair share”. The point was that while competitors were cutting back on investments in marketing and trembling in their boots, this was a tremendous opportunity to increase investments, increase awareness, and ultimately gain market share. The company he works with is in the gardening and plant industry which has been classified as essential here in Alberta. He has a good point but not every company can do this. 

Marketing Strategy Options

After talking with a few colleagues in marketing I came up with the following 2 X 2 diagram.

The x-axis at the bottom shows a continuum for marketing share. The options are either to maintain market share (on the left) or to gain market share (on the right). The y-axis on the left shows a continuum for interaction. Some marketers will call this axis “engagement” but I want to emphasize that the interaction is initiated by the marketer by doing something like creating a post or uploading a video. The options are low interaction at the bottom and high interaction at the top. The result is a 2X2 with four boxes which represent four different approaches, or strategies, that can be taken. Let’s review each.

Relax

This is basically a do-nothing approach where the strategy is to do as little as possible with marketing. Correspondingly, expectations of gaining any market share should be low. In fact, if you take this approach you may lose market share.

The advantage, however, is that you can relax, take a break, enjoy life, and maybe learn something new. If you use this strategy, then you are focusing on personal time and renewal. 

Remind

A second approach is in the top left corner. In this case, you are just staying in touch with people and customers, but you don’t really have any objective of gaining market share. If anything, you are just trying to maintain your current level of loyalty. But to do this you have to put in some effort to keep in touch.

Most likely this will be in the form of publishing blog posts, optimizing web pages for search engines, sending out newsletters, and responding to posts by others. The basic idea with this strategy is to stay top-of-mind and let your market know that your company is operational and doing just fine.

Engage

With this strategy, you are trying to engage and interact with people in your target market. The objective is definitely to maintain market share and even gain market share but without investing too much in advertising. In this case, you are being aggressive on social media but spending on advertising is restrained.

Most of the activities that you will be doing will be on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You may spend a little to boost ads and reach a wider audience, you are not spending bundles to gain market share. Instead, you are listening, answering questions, suggesting, motivating, and encouraging contacts in your market. 

Expand

If you have cash flow and you think that the market will buy now or sometime in the future, then the strategy that you may want to take is to expand your market share. This is an aggressive strategy that involves investing in advertising in addition to Reminding and Engaging. The objective of this strategy is to stay top-of-mind and let your market know that your company is operational and open for business - now and in the future.

If you want to sell products now or in the future then this may be the best strategy to take. Investing heavily in advertising may feel risky at this time but remember that the COVID-19 pandemic is not going to last forever. We are going to get through this. If you want to get a good return on your investment, then this may be just the right time to invest heavily in marketing and acquiring new customers in addition to keeping your current customer base. 

Conclusion

The decision is yours to make. Think about what you want to do for yourself and then think about what you want to do for your company. You may want to relax and rest. Alternatively, this may be an excellent chance to increase your share of the market through engagement and advertising.

Contact me if you have any thoughts or questions.