We’ve had this dilemma in many businesses, so we are guessing it may be the same for you. You probably know the best way to survive a recession is to market your way out of the recession. (And we are now in a recession!) However, when to start that marketing?
Particularly at the moment when it feels a little crass or insensitive to be marketing? There is no perfect time to be marketing with this Coronavirus crisis still raging. But if you have a business which can and still wants to trade during the lockdown period, then it is all about timing and the words you use in your marketing communications.
Every day you will be seeing your customers moving through the 4 stages of change;
- denial,
- resistance,
- resignation,
- acceptance.
And when people get to acceptance, they are ready to agree that we are in a new normal and will start looking to the future. This means, they will be ready to buy. If your customers are in an industry that will weather this storm, they will still have a budget to spend. In fact, they may actually be wanting your help right now.
Like the importance of timings, it is also about how sensitively you approach them. Go straight in for a hard sell, and you could potentially lose a customer. Our suggestion is to look through your customer list and choose which customers to approach and in which order. It’s always best to start with your best and most trusted customers. Pick up the phone to them and have an open conversation about how they are personally feeling, where their business is at and what’s on their mind. It’s important that you don’t have a locked down agenda for this call. In this call you want to discover what their needs are right now, and of course if you can help them with this, then great.
After you have done a few of these phone calls you will get a sense of where your customer base is right now. In other words, have they mostly got to acceptance yet? Or are they still in resistance or resignation? Or are they still mourning the business or future which has just been snatched away from them? If the majority of your customers are not yet in acceptance, your marketing needs to be about individual phone calls to customers and helpful (not selling!) content for them. When you are seeing the majority of them in acceptance, you can then move onto a more complete marketing campaign.
If you are wondering what you can afford to spend on marketing right now, remember that there are grants, loans and deferred tax payments available for nearly every single business regardless of their size. If you want to know what is available, then please give us a call and we would be happy to help..