Pivoting your marketing strategies in the wake of a crisis

Quotes

• “I think that overall, we are still far from routine and I think there will be a lot of opportunities to re-adjust our routine as we find out in the coming weeks and months the real scope of this crisis.” -Todd “[It all depends] on what those solutions are in place. Solutions for our business, as well as government solutions, policy solutions and just socially, how the lay of the land is going to change.” -Todd “I am cautiously optimistic and one of the reasons why I say that is, things are bad. Let’s just be honest. The coronavirus is a horrible epidemic and it is going to take people’s lives.” -Ben “From a day-to-day perspective, now that we are into a few weeks into managing through this crisis, we are starting to build habits again.” -Ben “We have figured out how to stabilize in terms of our content production so far. Our goal for the triage phase was to protect our product and make sure that we have a product that we could actually sell and now the question is how should we be thinking about growth.” -Ben“We have gone from 40,000 downloads a month to 57,000 downloads a month from January to February which is a new record. A lot of creditto that goes to two things: we have an app store optimization campaign while we were higher at the iTunes podcast ranking and second, we started with a programmatic advertising agency.” -Ben “This is really a complicated time and I’m sure that other people that are budget owners are thinking about this is, ‘I have a limited amount of resources, should I be marketing or should I be holding on to that capital to protect my business.” -Ben “I honestly don’t know what the right answer is right now. We are in a little bit of wait-and-see mode. We are going to cautiously invest some budget to keep the lights on to keep the business and make sure that we are keeping the commitments to our sponsors but I don’t know if we are going to go all in.” -Ben“There’s just inherent risk. I might need that budget to pay my salary, pay for Todd and the rest of our team and our editor. There is an internal debate here on my head on what should we be spending.” -Ben “The most obvious is to focus more on organic and unpaid marketing channels. That’s thinking about our SEO, thinking about what kind of content we can create to add value to the audience that we already have.” -Todd“In place of spending money to grow our audience, how can we grow our audience organically with content and how can we also better serve our existing audience.” -Todd “The news cycle is going to be dominated by the coronavirus for the foreseeable future and people’s minds are not on business growth right now in a lot of cases. I think it’s healthy for people to be more conservative.” -Ben “For us, this is the perfect time to evaluate our performance marketing efforts. We are going to testing some other channels, we have a programmatic channel and we have data on that. But really where my head is at, is we need to develop organic marketing strategies.” -Ben“First and foremost, start building content, SEO, social content syndication, getting that organic traffic, building more pages and getting Google to start sharing the word about you.” -Ben “People are still working, maybe a little less but they are still consuming content. Influencer marketing, building relationships with people that have influence. This is the biggest way that you are going to build your organic growth engine.” -Ben“If you start from day one and you’re building an organic marketing machine, you are not going to see the type of return than you would on day one of a performance marketing campaign. These channels take time to mature.” -Ben “But start building that machine so in 1, 3 or 6 months from now, all of a sudden you have a content archive that is building on itself so when you look back, okay those were tough times but we put our head down, did the work and now we have an organic marketing engine.” -Ben“Go be gutsy. What else do you have to lose? Money is drying up and you have to be creative and don’t leave bullets in the chamber.” -Ben“Start building all those data analytics that you wanted to. Start digging into the data that you have, understand and have a better sense of who your most valuable customers are, and slim down that target.” -Ben