Reflecting On Marketing In 2020
You might have noticed that our social media and blog posting schedule became non-existent in early 2020 when the pandemic started. Aside from the post we shared about the Do’s and Don’ts of marketing during a pandemic, we’ve been essentially radio silent on our communication channels.
That’s not to say we haven’t been working tirelessly for our clients, but instead shines a light on on how difficult marketing your own small business can be when the world comes screeching to a halt.
Some days it was all we could do to stay on top of the headlines for the day, then adapt (then refine, then revise, then redraft again) the messaging our clients relied on us to provide when they weren’t sure what to say.
So we’re slowly but surely getting back to business as usual, and to kick things off we wanted to share this blog containing a few important things that we learned over the past 12 months.
Be A Good Partner
We started our business to provide marketing solutions for small businesses, so when the pandemic hit the first thing we did was connect with each of our clients and make sure they were interested in and able to continue our services.
For those of our partners who needed to take a pause, we concluded pre-paid services and let the agreement lapse with no fees or penalties. We didn’t want them to drain limited resources when no one knew for sure when things would be back to normal, or by paying for work we couldn’t complete to the level we were comfortable with.
For those partners who were able to continue engaging with us, we are filled with gratitude. Not only for providing us with some stability during an uncertain time, but for trusting in us to handle marketing and communications for your brand throughout this most critical and difficult time.
Everyone had to adjust to doing the same or more, with less resources. Our clients had to adapt, and in some instances close for long periods of time, so we felt it was only appropriate for us to do the same to meet them where they were.
Be True To Your Brand
We’ve talked a lot already in previous posts about the importance of a clear brand identity, and to be honest it was the foundation of our success this past year. Because each of our clients had clear, well defined brand identities we were able to use those to guide distinct communication strategies for each.
When in person activities couldn’t occur for one of our non-profit partners, we shifted instead to sharing community resources and helping to amplify volunteer opportunities and supply needs that their followers could contribute to or participate in.
When travel wasn’t permitted, we pivoted to designing online and virtual experiences to promote our destination partner; and helping to amplify their local businesses who had online options for people to engage with without leaving their living rooms.
For our own marketing perspective, we made a conscious decision to go dark and focus only on maintaining the projects we had open already instead of cultivating new partnerships. The stress of navigating the pandemic personally while staying productive professionally was real, and we didn’t want to overextend ourselves. Which leads us to our big mistake.
What We Could Have Done Better
As champions of small business we realize that our followers probably needed our educational blog posts and social media ideas more in the past year than at any time before. And we weren’t there for you.
If you reached out about our services and we weren’t able to assist you because we weren’t accepting new clients; then we let you down by not sharing free resources you could implement yourself.
We pride ourselves on being a helpful resource and sharing what we know and new things we learn. And that’s what you can expect from us moving forward.
Over the coming months we’ll share more how-tos and new tools to help you promote your business. And if there are any topics or resources you want us to cover let us know in the comments!
Be safe and be well, and always patient with yourself.
