What is the Role of Marketing During Covid19?

May 7^th 2020

Whilst the world has been turned upside down by Covid19 with whole industries being shut down overnight, the role of marketing remains the same…

In its most basic form, in my view, Marketing has two key responsibilities which play a vital part in an Organisation’s success. These are to maintain and build upon the brand and reputation of the business and to create a demand for its products or services in the market.

There are of course, many ways to go about achieving these goals and even in these extraordinary times, dynamic and intuitive Marketing leaders are adapting their approach and messaging to achieve these objectives.

A recent global survey of 35,000 consumers conducted by Kantar found that the majority of your customers, prospects and community want to hear from brands, with only 8% of respondents believing that brands should stop advertising entirely.

This should send a clear message to the Marketing community that they should move ahead in their marketing efforts and continue the conversation with their audiences… But this does not appear to be the case.

According to a survey carried out by Marketing Week (March 2020) to over 900 Marketers, 55% of those who responded have postponed or are reviewing their marketing campaign spend and 60% are cutting budgets.

Whilst I can understand the concerns around ROI and how your message may be perceived by customers and prospects, the evidence is clear. People want to hear from you.

Furthermore, something that I feel may be being overlooked is this…

New business conversations are happening every day. People are out there prospecting, having conference calls and building new business relationships.

Projects are being postponed, pipelines are being extended and sales have slowed down, unless you work for Purell or Zoom of course, but early stage pipeline is alive and kicking. We can see this at Account Media, with many partners increasing their content syndication efforts to reach an audience more online than ever before.

Across our network we have seen an uplift of 38% over the last 30 days in digital content consumption, with readers actively researching resources to make more informed purchasing decisions on business technology.

Furthermore, the need for Marketing to support Sales has never been so important as it has been today. Cold calling and cold prospecting can be tough enough at the best of times, but at the moment its an even more daunting task.

So just as my last article called for Sales to be brave in their efforts and continue to try and sell, I am a calling on the marketing community to do the same.

Continue the conversation with your audiences through branding and display, support your comrades in sales through investment in demand generation and don’t measure short term ROI as an indicator of the success, this will l be realised in the months to come.