While much of the immediate post COVID-19 focus has been on disrupted marketing cycles and processes, it is also important to understand its impact on buyers. Audience-centric marketing and messaging is certainly a best practice now that marketers are through the immediate need to pivot and realign resources to accommodate in-person cancellations. Now, marketers need to dive in and understand how the buyer’s journey has changed overall.
Kicking off a massive persona project may not be in the cards for you right now, but there is data and research that we can learn from in order to better inform marketing strategies. As marketers increasingly switch to digital marketing tactics, they will need to know how to prioritize channels and act on the data that is captured through those interactions.
The way I see it, we’ll need to understand and think more strategically about three core areas of marketing:
- Buyers – We need to understand more about the “surviving” buyers and how they are making purchase decisions. We also need to think about what that means from a target market perspective if you market to a heavily impacted industry.
- Messaging – Certainly we must market with empathy, but there is a delicate balance between doing that and overloading “in these uncertain times.” Marketers must straddle this line while also providing differentiation.
- Content and Delivery Mechanisms – Marketers have more data than ever before, especially with more interactions moving digital. Teams need to figure out what is working well and then refocus efforts on those content types and interactions buyers are gravitating towards.
I’m hosting a webinar “The Evolution of the Buyer’s Journey: What’s Changed, What Hasn’t,” with Barry Vasudevan, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, on June 3 to talk about these areas. It’ll be a great conversation that’ll dive into each of these elements. Make sure to register today!