We are in a recession and in the middle of a pandemic. And frankly, your market share and revenue may decline. Instead of focusing on worrying about declining sales, focus on increasing your mind share with your customers and possible leads. How can you do this especially in the middle of a crisis? PR is one of the marketing activities that can help do this while allowing you to spend less.
You, and many of your customers, suddenly have a large amount of free time at home. Use this time by focusing on back-end marketing efforts that you may have struggled to find time during the past such as blogging on the company website. Or start the podcast you’ve been thinking about — you can even make time for interviews on other people’s podcasts.
But, why should you focus on these activities? Here we break down why PR is the way to go during a crisis:
Authority by association:
When you appear in any sort of media such as a podcast or trade magazine, you get access to their loyal audience. Landing an interview, especially in niche media platforms, allows you to place your expertise around people who already trust and invest their time reading that magazine or listening to that podcast.
This is an especially good strategy during a crisis because your clients and even future leads are already keeping up with the news and trends as the breaking news around a crisis develops which in turn allows you to really share
Aligning yourself with experts:
During times of crisis, there can be a saturation of messaging from officials to those commenting in the media. One way to cut through the noise is by aligning yourself with experts. When you find that you can constructively add to the conversation surrounding a crisis in an interview, you join a rank of experts in your field or niche that have provided valuable information in the past and during uncertain times.
Don’t burn out leads:
It can be easy to tighten the belt on marketing activities outside of paid strategies that offer leads, like social media advertising, however, these can quickly burn out your customers. During a crisis, your consumers do not want to see advertisements because they are worried about the bigger picture: job security, finances, etc. Targeting them with ads can annoy them or worse, make you look insensitive. By focusing on strategies that are less in their face and highlight your expertise, you can get in front of them without actually getting IN FRONT of them.
PR strategies can be both proactive and reactive. By focusing on these and planning ahead you can create an earned media strategy that will not only weather you through a crisis, but can help you and your brand stick out beyond that.
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