As the coronavirus continues to disrupt the lives of people all over the world, trying to manage your business and keep it moving can feel overwhelming.
This feeling of uncertainty and strain has no real endpoint in sight right now.
Which isn’t reassuring at all, but does lay out the reality of what we are dealing with: a period of potential pain and challenge that we have never dealt with before.
To deal with this uncertainty, we need to refocus our energies on a few key ideas and actions.
Here are a list of three that can help your business weather this period.
Get yourself in the position of your customer:
Market Orientation is a foundational principle of marketing.
It simply means turning the lens from the way you view your business to look at it through the eyes of your customers.
By doing this, you’ll be surprised that the things you think are super important are of little or no concern to your market.
During the next stage of the pandemic, you do need to make that shift and see things from the vantage point of your customers to better understand what they need, what they are feeling, and how you can add value to their lives or their businesses.
Ask yourself, “What can I do to help right now?” And, “What are my customers struggling with and through right now?”
Questions like that will help you have a better grasp on what is going on and allow you to provide better value to your customers.
Make sure you are positioned correctly:
Right now, we are in holiday mode or getting there and a lot of holiday mailers and ads are starting to come up everywhere.
That’s great.
It does allow us a break from the year and the BS we’ve been dealing with all year long, but it also is a point where things can get out of control because what happens if a business decides to push all of their messages out like a normal year?
They’d fail miserably because this is not a normal year.
A disruption like this is a great time to think about your position in the market.
And, by having such a large scale change in the way that people are living, it gives marketers and salespeople a great opportunity to position themselves against a lot of things that we may have never thought we’d have to position ourselves against like staying away from family this holiday season, not celebrating the year, and not getting back to normal.
For you, you want to make sure you look at where you are and ask yourself are you positioning yourself in a way that reflects the value you deliver, the world we are dealing with now, and puts you in a position to compete for your customer’s attention in a way that will give you the opportunity to win.
Don’t panic and just start discounting or throwing out crazy “promotions”:
The most basic rule of branding for businesses and people is that your brand is the accumulation of every interaction a person may have with your brand: positive and negative.
In general, this means I don’t want you to discount because it says, “We don’t really believe our product is worth what we are telling you it is worth.”
Right now, discounting looks like desperation.
By all means, not discounting doesn’t mean not using the price lever, it means not using the price lever like a maniac.
The same goes for promotions.
Everything you do right now needs to be considered and looked at through the eyes of the people you are aiming to serve.
What do your customers need?
Is a price reduction really what they need or is it an easy way to feel like you are doing something?
Will a promotion for 2-for-1 whatever mean something to your market?
Or, is it a way to say, “Hey, we tried?”
A great example of a good use of price and promotion is in the way that McDonald’s and Travis Scott worked together on a Travis Scott meal. The $6 price tag was a discount and meaningful to people that were struggling to feed their families. It gave Travis Scott and McDonald’s a lot of attention. And, it didn’t come off in a haphazard or poor way.
A total win.
For you, as you move through this pandemic, you need to remember the lesson of look at things from the eyes of your audience, position the offer correctly and don’t do anything that you’ll live to regret.
This period is tough for all of us, but we will get through it.