What is Your COVID-19 Mid-Pandemic Marketing Plan?

As the COVID-19 pandemic looks like it could be reaching a midpoint with the apparent beginnings of a slowdown of the infection rate and hospitalizations, it is time to consider your mid-pandemic marketing strategy and plan. Consideration of the topic is especially important if you have “hunkered down” cut budget, staff and disappeared entirely from the marketplace.

The time to start to come out from your business isolation is now. Not two or three months from now. How you begin to position and market your organization today will, in large part, determine the success or failure of your organization in the new normal.

Your markets and critical influencers have short memories.

While you stayed in contact with your existing clients, your prospects have forgotten who you are. By going silent and not developing and executing helpful, information-based resources for them strategy during the pandemic, your prospect will be turning to those that were present. The top of mind still plays an important role. These companies that stayed in the game and found a way to be a leader and resource are the winners in the new normal. All others can take a back seat.

Now that you are behind the eight ball, here are several steps to take immediately. 

1.       Revisit your value proposition. There is a new “normal” in the markets, and markets are no longer what they were. Though your mission may still be the same, the pandemic has been life and business changing. You can talk all you want about being a valued and trusted partner, but when the going got tough, you disappeared. 

2.       Complete your transformation to digital marketing and communications. 

3.       Up your game and the content on your LinkedIn company page and corporate website to engage. Add value all the time, every time to the content. 

4.       Look for new areas of business. Many prospects and even some clients are not going to make it. Markets will consolidate, companies close, merge and be acquired. The bottom line is your market will shrink even more than previously.  

5.       Lay the groundwork to rebuild the trust of your employees. Furloughs and layoffs are hard, but if senior management did not take any pay cuts and “favored” employees kept their jobs while others left, trouble behind, trouble ahead.  Optics are everything when trying to recover. Rebuilding trust and culture is job one internally. 

6.       Focus on engagement and be humble. In other words, lose the attitude in sales, process, and perceived self-importance. Lose the opinions in management. Lose the beliefs and inflated concepts of self-importance and the size of the company, or your perceived herculean efforts to save the company. You abandoned your prospects by going silent. There is a loss of trust and belief in what you will be selling.  

7.       Prepare to execute a consistent and value-added presence in the market. That means updating or creating a new short and executable marketing plan.  

8.       Get ready to cut your pricing. You will have to sacrifice some margin to regain lost ground in the new market. Fewer prospects in your markets mean more significant pressure on pricing. You may not like it, but it is what it is.

A new day and opportunity are present. Reengage now, or the last one out the door turns the lights off.

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing, communications strategist, and thought leader. As an internationally followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters, is read in 52 countries and is listed on the 100 Top Healthcare Marketing Blogs & Websites ranked at No. 3 on the list by Feedspot.com. Michael is a Life Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives. An expert in healthcare marketing strategy, digital marketing, and social media, Michael is in the top 10 percent of social media experts nationwide and is considered an established influencer. For inquiries regarding strategic consulting engagements, email me at michael@themichaeljgroup.com. Connect with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Opinions expressed are my own.

For more topics and thought leading discussions like this, join his group, Healthcare Marketing Leaders For Change, a LinkedIn Professional Group.