Your secret weapon in a recession
Now is the time to be winning hearts and minds
As the Chancellor of the Exchequer said last night, “these are tough times, and there is more to come”. With some experts predicting that the economy could drop as much as 35% by June and the IMF saying that the pandemic has plunged the world into a “crisis like no other”, it’s time to deploy all the recession busting tools at your disposal… and the most effective and cost efficient of these is purposeful, strategic communications.
Strategic communications is not “PR”. It’s not about pumping out corporate puffery. It’s about emotionally connecting with all your stakeholders and building your reputation. Now is the time to be winning hearts and minds. Stakeholders support companies that they trust – especially when times are tough – and strategic communications around your purpose is far more effective at building trust than big marketing campaigns.
Many brands grabbed the opportunity and got the first mover advantage with Coronavirus community support campaigns, but this is going to be a long game – even in the best case ‘quick bounce back’ scenario. One well timed campaign is not going to win the day.
Rather focus on steady, consistent and relevant communications that really connects with your audience.
Stakeholder Mapping
In order to produce communications that really are relevant you need to really know your stakeholders. In the hurly-burly whirlwind of business it is rare to have this fully mapped out, but no time like the present to start.
List ALL of your stakeholders, identify who has the biggest influence on your ability to create value, RAG rate them in terms of their supportiveness of you. This will help you to find your endorsers and detractors, and then try and ascertain who influences whom. Lastly, identify what issues are most important to your endorsers and detractors, and overlay this with your proof points on those issues.
This exercise will give you the content themes you need to be communicating (and where your purpose should lie if you haven’t already identified that) and then all you need to do is identify which messages are to be delivered to which audiences how and when.
Channel Strategy
Not everything has to go on social media. Where there are strategically important messages that need to be landed think beyond the typical comms toolkit. What can be incredibly effective is to give key executives in the business the responsibility for building and nurturing relationships with specific stakeholders.
Examine the existing social and professional networks that you have access to. It’s quite possible that an intimate post-lockdown celebratory dinner with a handful of carefully selected stakeholders would be far more effective than a LinkedIn post.
Fit the message to the audience and get creative about the channel.
Purpose
The businesses that truly stood by their values and demonstrated their purpose beyond profit will be the first out the gate when this is all over. Use this opportunity to do the soul searching required, build your positioning around it and strategically share your message with those who have the greatest influence over your future success.
May the force be with you!
Further Reading
If you haven’t already read them, here are a couple great books to get you started on PURPOSE