#ContentMarketing: 4 Ways to Strike the Right Tone As Business Resumes

Businesses in nearly all sectors have faced one of their greatest brand challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic – how to strike the right tone with their content marketing efforts. And for the most part, companies have succeeded by addressing COVID-19 head-on and taking an empathetic tone.

But by mid-May, many of these messages became redundant. Research by Ace Metrics showed that advertising based solely on COVID-19 started to wane in popularity, and terms such as “uncertain times” began a slippery downward slope from helpful to exploitive.

Now, as all 50 states ease stay-at-home restrictions and more businesses get back to full speed, the race to capture an audience’s attention will be greater than ever. How can your audience find the right tone? We recommend following these four best practices.

1. Be Direct.

Do you continue to mention COVID-19 in your content marketing, or do you avoid it to keep your content more evergreen? It’s a question every organization will face. Our advice: As long as it fits within the context of your message, absolutely mention COVID-19, but don’t make your content pieces all about the pandemic. COVID-19 is a common global experience. Ignore it completely and run the risk of consumers or other corporations viewing you as out of touch.

Stay factual and continue to lean toward an empathetic tone without using those already-trite “new normal” phrases. Just as important, avoid being cheeky or snarky, even on social media. According to a recent Marketing Dive article, the days of competitive sparring on social channels are over. Fewer than one quarter (21%) of consumers welcome any brand attempts at lightening the situation with humor or comic relief.

2. Be Educational.

Education over sales – it’s the Golden Rule of effective content marketing. And it holds true today as much as ever. For B2B and B2C marketers, this is the sweet spot where COVID-19 and new business products, trends and processes meet. Show how your company—or your product—solved key pain points during the pandemic. Shout any successes from the rooftops. After all, companies and consumers alike will assume if your business can deliver on its brand promise during global adverse events, then it will bring even greater results in calmer times.

Make sure your content dives into the details of how you helped customers or consumers. For example: Did your telemedicine app deliver a high user experience during the pandemic? Was it easy to stand up? And if your company didn’t have a chance to show its mettle during the COVID-19 pandemic, show how it could help going forward.

3. Be Aspirational.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it tons of problems and great uncertainty about the future. It’s good practice for your content to be authentic—to admit that your solution may not have all the answers. But it’s also important to be aspirational. For a logistics company, that might mean explaining how a solution deployed during the pandemic can now provide supply chain visibility beyond the norm. For a real estate brokerage, that might mean showing how the market will change in the upcoming months. This recent Forbes article uses historical data to show how housing markets boom after crises. Painting a post-COVID picture of financial stability or wellness holds enormous potential to garner new business.

4. Be Flexible.

Resist the urge to make all your content evergreen. While any post-COVID budget constraints may make you hyper-focused maximizing every piece of content, most experts believe marketers should plan campaigns only for one quarter, maybe two at the most. Be ready to pivot as market, business and community forces change. That may not mean a complete reworking of all content assets, but it will require constant vigilance to make sure your content is as relevant as possible.

We hope these four guideposts can help your firm’s content marketing efforts strike the right tone, allowing your sales teams compete for new business and ease any pain the months-long shutdown has caused.