Part 2: Post-Pandemic Marketing
Part 2: Post-Pandemic Marketing
While the world’s citizens long for the normal habits and familiar places they enjoyed pre-pandemic, CMOs are facing the need to find new marketing channels and pioneer new strategies for a post-pandemic world.
In Part 1 of this two-part series, 2020 research and survey results made one thing clear: Marketers are finding the need to abandon social media advertising. Traditional brand-building methods are drying up. And a new kind of marketing effort is called for.
In this Part 2, we continue the analysis, panning for gold, and describe what works going forward for prospecting ROI in a post-pandemic world.
After Covid-19 stay-at-home orders have lifted, retail will rebound much more slowly than manufacturing, and conferences will take place in a virtual setting more often than ever before. Air travel, tradeshows, cruises, and classrooms will likely take the brunt of the fallout from Covid-19, and not see business return to normal levels for perhaps 12 – 18 months. Organizations that rely upon international visitors, such as tourism, are in for a long haul.
According to the most recent IBISWorld Report:
“The Trade Show and Conference Planning industry relies on domestic and international travel into the United States, which is expected to stagnate in the current year following the outbreak of COVID-19 (coronavirus), potentially tapering industry demand.
Companies typically sponsor employees to attend trade shows and conferences. Since the outbreak of coronavirus is expected to precipitate a decline in aggregate corporate profit levels, the industry may be negatively affected, as a smaller proportion of capital is allocated toward spending on industry events.”
“The Covid-19 pandemic will change our world forever…. We will rethink the need for meetings and conferences.”
~ Dr. Tom Frieden, former Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives
There is what I call the “post-pandemic hangover” – a nagging fear that large groupings of humans are to be avoided, for fear of a recurrence of Covid-19. It is probably harder to get rid of that hangover than to shore up the economy with a government stimulus package. After the economic collapse of 2008, it took a few years for business optimism to rebuild. Even then, hiring was not assertive. Businesses continued to operate in a “lean and mean” fashion for years.
With business owners holding their collective breaths, awaiting some return to normalcy, and while marketing has taken a side street to an ROI desert, what should a CMO do? What can marketers do for those businesses that have relied upon social media to fill their cruise lines, conferences, arenas, trade shows, and exhibit halls? How does a brand build connections and spur sales?
At the start of this article, it was hinted that a new form of marketing, a new more targeted approach, would need to take root. Post-pandemic marketing will have to find a new way to connect with the customer journey. But what would this look like?
Virtual conferences satisfy the need for bytes of education, mini symposiums that allowed registered attendees to learn, discover and connect around a topic or social need. We’ve seen a dramatic rise in this “marketing” format. Think of these as the bubbles in water that is starting to boil. Each meeting is generated with a series of enrollment emails. They percolate up, until a large cluster of expected attendees have joined each other online. Apart from the recent hacking episodes that took place on the Zoom platform, these remote conferences have given good access to the socially distant masses.
They may remember up to seven talking points, for a while, anyway.
But like those bubbles of water vapor, when they reach their peak, the meeting ends, and some residual energy is carried away as steam. The meeting loses steam, its job is done. Those in the meeting gained some insights (hopefully) and can now get back to whatever their regular day’s work entailed. They may remember up to seven talking points, for a while, anyway.
WHAT IF?
But what if you could fashion a visual meeting, a perfectly curated exhibit, in motion, with relevant written documents, and give access any time, day or night? And what if attendees could revisit that event, as often as needed? This sounds a lot like video, doesn’t it?
From a marketing perspective, one distinct need for any customer journey is to offer content that is tuned to the right audience. The issue with a video platform like YouTube is that the content can be distracting, and random. First you are watching a printer tutorial, and the next thing you know, you are watching as kittens try to exit paper bags.
Not to mention, the online search for the right content can be a self-defeating exercise (because of those kittens).
We know that bringing together top-quality videos for instruction, product demos, business seminars, and sales tools, all in one site– one virtual “exhibit hall” just for the sign industry– solves a lot of problems. First, there are no distractions from the single industry hub and its targeted content. Second, any sign professional can revisit any video booth as often as needed, any time it fits in their schedule, day or night. Third, there are no airfares to book, no lingering pandemic hangovers to fight, and no days away from business.
But can video presentations exceed the marketing and branding impacts of social media? As it turns out, they can, and do. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, but only 10% when reading it in a text. (Bitable.com). On top of this, 90% of users say that product videos are helpful in the decision process (Source: Hubspot)
Here are just some of the remarkable statistics that Wyzowl recently released their 2019 Video Marketing Statistics Report from over 600 marketing respondents:
• 87% use video in their marketing strategy
• 83% of marketers claimed to have gotten a good ROI from video
• 94% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service
• 84% of marketers say video has helped them increase traffic to their website
• 81% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads
Marketing professionals have enjoyed featuring informative videos on the School of Sign Arts website since 2017 where each is viewable long after a Facebook ad has disappeared.
The School of Sign Arts website is an online video platform for sign industry products, training videos, and business e-learning content. A clearly defined scholastic-focused platform gives greater weight to the content of each company’s video (increasing recall), and there is synergy: A viewer stops by one video presentation, and when done, sees another that draws them in.
Just like strolling through an exhibit hall, new products and purveyors catch attention and draw viewers in.
We know that forward-looking marketers find ample immediate and long-term benefits using this marketing channel.
Over 200 companies have already found a home on the SOSA platform.
And for those organizations and individuals who do not have the bandwidth to craft a first-class video presentation in-house, the Sign Biz + SOSA team takes care of that, too. There are also options for those who have quality MP4 files ready to go. Learn more here about the easy process to get online:
SB2 Show Biz
If you want to discuss any of your marketing challenges, feel free to DM me here on LinkedIn. Let’s get through these challenging times together and arrive at a better tomorrow.
Teresa M. Young has been a consultant to entrepreneurs since 1986, in both retail and B2B sectors. In 1991 she became President of Sign Biz, Inc., a full-service business development company. Young sits on multiple boards, including as Past Chairwoman of both the International Sign Association (ISA) and California Sign Association. Her company has launched more than 200 new entrepreneurs into their own sign businesses. She is an in-demand speaker, engaging business owners with topical and powerful business insights and strategies in support of best practices and modern marketing strategies.
