... or on the importance to stay in touch
With the ongoing global pandemic and many countries still in lockdown, you may have decided as a business to cut down on your marketing and communications.
Maybe you had to reallocate the budgets to some other activities, maybe you had to furlough your marketing team, maybe both.
Yet, whichever webinar you attend or blog you read, the advice is pretty consistent: do stay in touch with your customers.
‘No wonder she’s telling us that’ I hear you say, ‘she’s in the marketing industry, she just wants us to keep spending.’
To which I’d answer, ‘Don’t view your marketing budget as a cost, see it as an investment’.
And if you can’t invest in being in touch with your customers financially - through paid for media like print advertising or Pay Per Click for example - do invest some of your time engaging with them.
A phone or video call, a personal email or regular posts on your social pages will make a world of a difference between you and the competitors who chose to remain silent.
A healthy brand - read in ‘brand’ the imprint your business has in your customers’ minds - is a brand that sticks in people’s minds for the right reasons.
And if you think of your brand as a person, you’ll remember easily what to do to achieve that over time. There are in essence 3 things that make your brand a healthy one:
-Visibility
-Familiarity
-Relevance
Today I will focus on - you’ve guessed it! - Visibility.
If people don’t know - or remember - that your business/brand exists, you’re off to a pretty bad start. Think of a place you go to regularly - physically like the supermarket, or virtually like on social media. Over time you’ll notice the same person at the check out, or that the same friends on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc keep popping up.
On the other hand, do you remember the name of old school friends you haven’t seen - physically or virtually - in years? Or can you picture the face of the people who take in deliveries in the stock room of your supermarket?
Pandemic or not, lockdown or not, our brains are still the same - they want an easy life.
For a lot of their purchases, people will be on automatic pilot and will rely on habits, recency, and emotions. They will choose the brands (products or services) that are present in their minds at the time, those they have heard from not so long ago, those they are used to and that consistently made them feel ‘good’ (as in happy, safe, satiated, comfortable, smart, savvy etc).
So remember, ‘Out of sight, Out of mind’ - for which interestingly the French say ‘Loin des yeux, Loin du coeur’ or ‘Far from my eyes, Far from my heart’…
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