Congratulations! You beat level 2020 and made it to the first day of a new year.
I hope this finds you invigorated and feeling positive about what lies ahead, if not a little hungover.
While you might still be thinking about all the ways to improve your business this year, we thought we’d share some lessons we learned in 2020.
Working with clients with several kinds of businesses, it’s exciting for us to see how many have embraced these five things without even thinking about them. By articulating them here, we hope to offer you a perspective that will help you continue to act with them in mind in the year ahead.
5 Marketing Lessons Learned in 2020
LEAD WITH EMPATHY
Every one of us has somehow been affected by the pandemic. Whether it’s that we’re more isolated, juggling new responsibilities that come with the general uncertainty that surrounds us, that we’ve experienced loss or simply that we’re under more stress, we’ve all been through the wringer. Maybe because we all are experiencing this collectively, acknowledging this has become commonplace in small business marketing.
At Creativ, we’ve always implored that empathy is critical to successful marketing. It’s not just about selling, but communicating in ways that evoke feelings that then lead to transactions. Empathy in marketing extends beyond your messaging.
Last year, we got to see that firsthand. Empathy showed up when restaurants donated meals to hospital staff but also had staff meals donated to them while partial shutdowns meant they could only do takeout orders. Empathy showed up when local banks started using their social accounts to help clarify how the PPP loan was supposed to work.
Without noticing it, businesses who always knew that delivering value creates loyal customers, but still couldn’t see how that works without selling to them, did so without even thinking about it.
Smart marketing is putting yourself into your customers’ shoes, doing the research to know their needs and wants and how they’re feeling, and delivering on those points to solve their problems.
Empathy leads to value leads to trust leads to sales. Keep it up!
INVEST IN CHANNELS TO COMMUNICATE IN A TIMELY MANNER
Things moved fast in 2020 (but also SO painfully slow). It was hard to keep up, but businesses that had already invested in building a foundation on social media and growing an email list had a leg up. We had a lot of help from Google and Facebook when they quickly created tools to help businesses let customers know about hours, online ordering and new services. Those who used them made it easier for people to know the latest.
Little things like this alleviate frustrations on the customers’ end and that matters. This should be the norm. If someone has to send a DM, call the restaurant or send an email to the front office with questions that are general, there’s potential to do better. Information like hours, menus, services, and general changes in how you’re operating your business should all be available for customers to find before they reach out directly.
Of course not everyone’s going to look for it, but you put less stress on your team when they’re not wasting time answering the same questions over and over when you could’ve just updated your website or posted on Instagram.
Keep using these channels to communicate consistently.
FOSTER YOUR COMMUNITY
In a world where we’re all bombarded with millions of messages a day, where anything we want to buy or learn is available from our smartphones, the most valuable currency to a business is not money, but trust.
Money from a customer that doesn’t trust you doesn’t last. Nurturing that trust starts with how you interact with the community you build around your business.
We don’t mean community as in how we throw around that word today (your social following), but the community of people without whom you couldn’t run your business: your customers, vendors, partners, employees, in addition to your social following.
Show up for them and interact with them consistently. Seek out and listen to their input. Be transparent and open with them about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Shared experience and openness create trust, too.
Especially for local businesses, people buy from and support people more than they buy what you’re selling. It’s unlikely they can’t get the same thing somewhere else... with all due respect.
Invest time into nurturing your relationships and facilitating trust and your community will show up for you when you need them to.
E-COMMERCE ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE
We work with mostly local, brick and mortar companies that do business in person. Part of what we do is enhancing their customer experience inside their four walls, but we also work to extend that experience online consistently.
As shutdowns limited people’s ability to frequent these places as often, an opportunity arose to find alternative ways to make some money.
Many got creative in finding ways to push transactions digitally, while others realized that simply setting themselves up for e-commerce opportunities was becoming a necessity. Things like making gift cards or a new branded t-shirt available to purchase on a website, or setting up the infrastructure for online ordering to facilitate the takeout process seem like small things, but they’re important steps to take now.
We know the future is digital, even for businesses that operate at physical locations. The pandemic helped a lot of people realize this.
If you took steps to bridge the gap between your in person and online transactions, good for you. Keep going!
ADAPT TO FLOURISH
“To Flourish Requires A New Kind of Openness”
Bear with me if you’ve heard me talk about this before, but there’s an article I read in January 2012 that means a lot to me. It left a big impression and changed how I think about what it takes for a business to thrive. I will spare you a full recap, but it speaks to the massive implications that the internet and a smaller, more connected world have on how we communicate, how we do business, and what skills are necessary to survive in this moment of time we find ourselves in.
We all know that change is inevitable. We’re aware that the speed of technology and disruption have implications on our business. Still, it's human nature to resist things that change our ways. That’s especially true if it means we have to develop a proclivity to take more risks.
Last year put us in a situation where many of us didn’t have the luxury to think too long and hard about the what ifs. Changes happened fast and we had to adjust quickly.
So, as the fine folks in that article already knew 9 years ago, we saw how being able to adapt isn’t just a nice skill to have, but totally necessary today. We saw so many pivoting their business model last year, changing up how they worked and what they offered and doing it quickly while still staying relevant to their brand.
These businesses flourished.
We saw meal kits being prepared with video tutorials on how to cook restaurant meals at home. Our favorite local distillery temporarily changed their product to accommodate a shortage of hand sanitizer. Movie theaters teamed up with local parks and parking lots to offer drive in movies. A live music venue and the record shop next door recorded live performances with local musicians. They then pressed these sessions to vinyl and sold them, with proceeds benefiting musicians whose gigs all but dried up.
Necessity is the mother of invention, indeed.
Maybe it’s not so bad that we didn’t have much time to think last year. We had to act. Acting quickly kept us in the game. I’m still hoping that 2021 cuts us some slack, but there was so much innovation in Charleston this year and that was exciting to see.
Maybe we needed a little shaking up to show us how agile our businesses can be. Maybe now that we know that approaching chaos head first just means we’ll get to the good things on the other side of it a little bit faster, all this change isn’t as scary.
Maybe we should stop thinking so hard about everything we learned last year and just get on with it. If you've made it this far down this post, I'm guessing you agree.
