Many organizations have been caught unprepared for the COVID-19 outbreak. Lack of planning for a crisis situation, means they are now scrambling to respond to the unprecedented global outbreak. Risks need to be mitigated. Key stakeholders informed as the situation continues to evolve. To keep productivity high and tempers even, you need to ensure that you have an adaptable business and branding strategy that will take you into the future.
Create business contingency plans
It is impossible to anticipate when a crisis will hit your business. You can, however, be prepared by identifying the team of people that will determine how best to respond to this. The team will need to access the correct information, evaluate various possibilities and their impact, develop strategies for every possible situation to enable an agile response.
With a wide team needing to provide input, it is important to choose a tool that allows easy collaboration and workflows across a number of different formats.
Adjust your marketing activity
In times of a crisis, the market is volatile, consumer behavior is unexpected. However, it is not wise for brands to stop their marketing effort altogether. Instead, brands should adjust their media and messaging to ensure that these are sensitive to consumers’ needs in the current crisis.
Brand health becomes vulnerable when companies stop advertising. If they do this for longer than six months it destroys both short- and long-term health.
Kantar Insights global head of media, Jane Ostler
In terms of media type, there should be a shift to social – for both driving digital content, and connecting to the right influencer. Scrunch also suggested that you could engage your community through a virtual event.
PageProof can help
PageProof enables you to work effectively in a crisis to review and approve the variety of marketing material needed in turbulent times.
Create workflows to enable people to act in different roles when reviewing the proof. Roles include reviewer, mandatory reviewer, gatekeeper and of course, the final approver. These workflows ensure that you receive timely input (with the right people reviewing the work at the right time – think the design team reviewing first before the copywriter does, and so forth), and of course the final approvals you seek.
Review anything and everything on PageProof. The type of situation and your business dictates what documents you may require to circulate for review and approval – Microsoft documents, presentations, Adobe PDFs, websites, Facebook ads, videos, imagery, packaging, and much more.
Be prepared for your branding and ready to adapt
In times of crisis, organizations need to be on their toes to ensure that employees, stakeholders, and customers are adequately informed. The current situation needs to be assessed, impact reviewed and contingency plans need to be put into place across all functions. Even though the intensity of the crisis may lessen in the future, organizations should revisit how they addressed the crisis management challenge and improve and update the strategy to remain prepared.