Marketing In Times of Uncertainty

If you're like the majority of business owners around the world right now you're worried about how your business will survive these times of uncertainty. 

And rightfully so.

When global crisis hits, most industries should prepare to withstand a 15-month downturn in sales of products and services. 

Let's look at some data to back this up: 

Below are  10 marketing solutions to a variety of challenges possibly facing your business at this time. In this article, I will touch on each solution briefly (for a deeper dive, click the button above for the complete training).

1. Extended Payment Terms

2. Virtual Services

3. Evaluations & Future Enhancements

4. Communicate Value

5. Virtual Classes

6. Packaged Bundles & Payment Plans

7. Scholarships

8. Marketing Review

9. Website Review

10. Facebook Fund

​An obvious challenge facing consumers right now is restricted cash flow. If customers aren't sure about their next paycheck or future financial stability, then their willingness to purchase is significantly impacted.

Depending on your industry and capabilities, offering extended payment terms can help ease anxiety and open doors to more consumers. 

Some ideas for extended payment terms include:

• 90 days, same as cash: ​​​​​
• 6 payments (1 payment every 3 weeks)
• 30-day payment hold
• Ascending payment (15%, 35%, 50%)
• Balloon payment (10% 4x, 60% final)
  ​

2) Virtual Services

Social distancing and the closure of many, if not all, brick-and-mortar businesses means that many of us cannot meet our clients in-person anymore. 

As thousands of businesses go remote for the first time, finding the best virtual tools and approach is mostly trial-and-error. Here are some suggestions of virtual services you can offer as well as the best pro-recommended tools to use to get the job done. I use these tools myself, 

Virtual Services To Offer:

• Video conference calls
• Screen share meetings
• Synchronous work sessions
• Remote trainings (see more about this one below)
• Facetime/What’sApp video calls.

Pro-Recommended Virtual Tools:

3) Evaluation & Future Projects

If you can't perform services for your clients right now, then a possible strategic solution is to develop evaluations for future enhancements for your customer base.

You can use evaluations to help identify your clients' current position and then present opportunities to enhance and strengthen it down the line. 

Recommended Evaluations:

• Current services evaluation
• Goals & milestones realignment
• Strategic growth plan
• Self improvement plan
• Marketing roadmap
• Workback timeline
• Priority plan

For example...

If you're a sales consultant or personal coach, now is a perfect time to offer self-improvement plans for your base. 

If you're a business consultant or agency, you can create a marketing roadmap, such as an editorial calendar, or bigger brand overhaul that they can implement. 

If you're in event or project planning, or your client base works with massive deadlines, a workback timeline may be the perfect evaluation to offer your base. This basically takes a growth plan or an execution plan and looks at it in reverse order. 

4) Communicate Value

You should already be communicating value with your business messaging, but now it's more important than ever. 

When people are unsure of what's happening in their world or the world around them, what they want are assurances that everything is going to be okay. They're not going to take action unless they know it's something they can be confident in.

This is your opportunity to continuously communicate value to them. Be the rock of reason, value, and education they need during this time.

Ways To Communicate Value:

• Re-evaluate your transactional email cadence and product focus. If you send out a newsletter or emails and pushing people to buy tings, then you need to reconsider what you're doing. Now is the time to be building and strengthening relationships and communicating assurances -- not hard selling. 
• Communicate assurances for your customer’s safety regarding your
  products/services they consume. So, for example, if you sell food, or household products or beauty products, you should change your emails and marketing messaging to assure them that you're taking all the necessary safety precautions. If you're in some kind of services business, you need to make sure you're communicating that whatever you're doing is still looking out for their best interests 
• Deliver meaningful value-first emails during this time. You want to focus on giving your customers something that's tangible and value-filled first. This could be something educational or entertaining that they can read or watch, but it needs to be valuable and cost nothing. After that, you can ask them to shop or call, but the focus first must be value. 
• Develop and distribute useful information to your customer-base. This is a perfect time to share your expertise and remind your customer base why you're the expert in what you do, For example, if you're a landscaping company, you could send your potential customers a list of native shrubs and trees that they may have in their backyard and guide them on how to identify if they're healthy or not. 
• Increase your communication cadence using the value-first approach. Now is not the time to go quiet. Communicate more if you can, and of course, this doesn't necessarily mean you try to sell more, Communicating value more often during this time will keep you top of mind for when they are ready to buy 

5) Virtual Classes

With remote customers, the challenge of delivering value becomes more acute -- that's where virtual classes, courses, or online trainings can come into play. 

Virtual Class Concepts:

• Online course to learn a specific subject.
• Course delivered via email series.
• Offer continuing education units.
• Best practices course.
• Online collaborative group learning.
• Blog-based course.
• Live video open forum Q&A sessions.

The biggest one that will take the most amount of time would be developing an actual online course, but all the other solutions are lower-tech options that can still be high-value. 

For example, a best practices course can be easily created for any industry. If you're an accountant or bookeeper, you can do it about the most current guidelines, or if you're a manufacturer or e-commerce business, you can give best practices for how to use your products, and so on. This can be as simple as a series of short, 3-minute videos that you email to your customers or a Facebook live video forum or even a blog-based course. 

6) Packaged Bundles & Payment Plans

Packaged Bundles and Payment Plans addresses the reluctance of consumers to buy when they're concerned about their cash flow.

By developing some simple, helpful bundled packages, with some easy financing options, you can reduce their risk, and increase their confidence, about spending money with you. 

Packaged Bundles & Future Payment Concepts:

7) Scholarships

This one is pretty unique and won't work for all industries, but some form of it can work for most businesses. 

You can deliver "scholarships" to your customers to help offset costs and get people into your products and services. Depending on what you sell and your customer base, this can range in number of scholarships offered and dollar amount.  

And, the best part is, you don't have to hugely discount your pricing to offer scholarships. There are tactics you can use to avoid that, which I explain in the recorded webinar that's part of the complete "Marketing in Times of Uncertainty" free training available to you. Click the button below to get yours now (and start the video training at 41:00 to skip directly to this tactic on scholarships).

Scholarship options:

• Free courses/service to get started.
• Discounted pricing.
• Special product offering where your company pays “x” percentage.

8) Marketing Review

This is an inward looking strategy. If your lead flow and conversion rates have dropped and sales are a bigger challenge than ever, now may be the perfect time to review your existing marketing strategies, offers, and marketing tech stack. 

Here Are Some Marketing Areas for Review:

Marketing Resources To Help Assess Your Strategy:

9) Website Review

Now is a fantastic time to take a close look at your website and brand assets to assess whether you need a brand and messaging overhaul. More than ever, your online presence is going to be the first thing your customer experiences.

Website Areas For Review:

• Does your Home Page deliver clarity for what you offer, who you serve and the success you can deliver your customers?
• Is your website design and aesthetic in line with your pricing? If you're into luxury, your website and branding better look high end. If you offer sleek, innovative technology services, then you should have a user-friendly website.
• How quickly can your customers get to what they are seeking? Do you include CTAs that give your audience a clear path to guide them to precisely the next step you want them to take? Make sure it's easy for them to sign up, contact you, shop, or do whatever it is you want them to do.

10) Facebook Fund

As of writing this article, Facebook was offering free ad dollars to affected small businesses. 

You can apply to get free advertising credits. If you already do online ads, this is a great opportunity to do ads for free. If you've never done ads before, this is a great time to learn how with minimized risk to you.

You WILL Survive

Remember, there is always great struggle before great triumph. Now is the time for you to take time for your business and plan, build, invest, and improve. 

But you must take action. You cannot simply stand on the sidelines and wait for things to change.