Planning a Major Marketing Campaign...in Isolation

Over the last few months, a solid chunk of my working hours (and, okay, some non-working hours) have been dedicated to planning a large marketing campaign...the largest I've ever had the pleasure in assisting with.

And it WAS a pleasure - even when the formerly-unthinkable, but now-inevitable, happened. COVID-19.

Thanks to being a close contact before falling prey to the dreaded spicy cough myself, I ended up spending a full two weeks in isolation. And unfortunately, those two weeks happened to be the oh-so-crucial final fortnight leading up to our campaign.

(Oh, and did I mention my manager also ended up in the same boat?)

But, I digress. To reiterate - C-19, quarantine and two boxes of throat lozenges aside, I still LOVED helping bring the campaign to life. As with anything worth doing, it was at times exhilarating, others frustrating; but ultimately, truly invaluable.

Here are five key learnings I took away from the experience.

1. Best laid plans…

A major component of our campaign was coordinating team building workshops for every office across the country. The workshops took place in the week prior to 'D Day', and the marketing team was all set to effectively run Perth's event (and get lots of social media content in the process). But then, a couple of extremely ill-timed positive tests. It was a stark reminder that you can have everything planned to the letter, and it can still go...well, tits up. It's like ray-ey-aaain on your wedding day etc etc. Which leads me directly to lesson number two...

2. ‘Team work makes the dream work’

If it weren't for our absolutely stellar national team, things could have fallen apart before the campaign had even begun. But thanks to the collective efforts of everyone who participated in the workshops - and the 'can do' attitude of our new Marketing Assistant - everything went smoothly. In fact, we were thrilled to receive positive feedback across the board! Much as it pained me to not be able to join in with the fun, I felt immense gratitude to my colleagues - and was reminded anew just how powerful a strong team can be.

3. Praise be to the digital age ??

Our smart phones are much maligned for supposedly disconnecting us from the 'real world' (to which I just have to say ahem ?)...but I literally couldn't be in the real world. I'm therefore very thankful that, due to an ever-growing range of tech solutions, I was able to Zoom, direct, delegate, tweak, post, schedule and share to my heart's content. Sure, working with one less screen than I was used to was mildly irritating - but I'll take 'mildly irritating' over 'everything is catastrophically ruined'.

4. Small wins

As nearly everyone on earth could probably attest at this point, being in quarantine makes life feel a lot more...microscopic. My world shrunk to about five rooms and, before I got sick, the park across the road. An upside of this strange phenomenon is that the usual 'small' wins felt much, much bigger. There were a collection of them during this period, but by far the biggest for me was presenting to two of our clinical teams as part of the workshops. Courtesy of said teams being on the other side of the country, the presentations were always going to be of a virtual nature - however, I hadn't banked on them taking place in my living room! As it turned out, all the friendly faces beamed into my 'rona space' ended up being a better salve than any painkillers - and I spent the rest of the day on a high.

5. A new lease on life!

By day 2 of our campaign, I was back in the office - and feeling that kind of joie?de vivre you only get after a dose of renewed perspective. I had never been so glad to see our messy* little office (*now very organised ??)! And it seemed the enforced rest time had done me good, as I started the week feeling refreshed and ready to take on just about anything.

Reflecting now, I think there's only one thing I'd change about the last couple of weeks - and that would be the chance to attend the Perth workshop. Otherwise, I actually believe this experience was beneficial in (hopefully) making me more resilient, flexible, and better able to make decisions and solve problems on the fly.

Have you had to operate around a 'spanner in the works'? What did you learn in the process?