Top 3 Marketing Tips for Startups During a Crisis

We really don’t want to get into ‘why marketing’ and ‘why startups’ right now, do we? Let’s skip the set-up and just jump right into the topic. What problems would your startup’s inside sales or marketing teams face during a crisis (at the scale of a global pandemic)?

I conducted a small on-call and on-chat survey with some local, glocal, and some international startup marketers. From the interactions, I inferred the following 5 problems forming the common patterns. (These problems are restricted to the lead generation and lead qualification processes).

1.     Bounced reach-outs (out of office replies)

2.     Delayed or no response

3.     Changed prospect expectations and outdated sales pitches

4.     Change in budgets – realignment of funds (at the client end)

5.     Extended sales cycles where even hot leads turn into damp interest queries

How can a marketing professional absorb these developments and come through for their respective companies? Here are 3 things every marketer, especially for a startup, should remember. If some CEOs want to look into this, they are more than welcome to do so.

Get down to the basics – Define your brand

The past few years have seen an upswing in the ‘SaaS ecosystem’. Startups, in particular, have adopted this ecosystem across departments. During the same ecosystem evolution, some social media and digital marketing professionals started considering suggestive metrics like ‘engagement’ and ‘reach’ as the end-all success benchmarks for campaigns.

This worked for them. However, the rush to be 'digitally-strong' pushed keyword and hashtag stuffing. These caught eyeballs and buzz without having much impact on branding.

Riding on trends is merely a booster. It isn’t branding. Trend-hopping without a strong brand is mere grunt work. It just adds to the noise. It doesn’t demarcate and add-on to the brand context and allure.

It’s a brand bubble. It is bound to pop sooner rather than later.

Please, oh please! Define your brand. Get down to the basics. The world has thrown you a curveball and a googly together. Get back to the drawing board and rediscover your brand. Let’s set up a heuristic for this since we all ‘love’ acronyms.

The NAD basics:

a.     What specific NEED does your brand fulfill?

Don’t go overboard here, as you did before. No flash and glamour. Just the facts. Nobody’s watching. It can be as simple as helping a user write a fresh blog.

b.     ALIGN the intent of the usage with your brand promise.

Let’s suppose your startup or brand helps a user write a fresh blog. Your product might be a laptop, a smartphone, or even a typewriter. Build your brand along the lines of the intent. ‘It simply helps people channel their inner voice’.

The buyer might hesitate to put down a premium if it’s just a laptop. But, if it’s a part of their ‘growth story’ or their ‘voice’, it becomes a part of their life.

They buy the product, but they own the brand.

c.     DEFINE your brand in a simple way.

Assume your prospect’s mood to be such: ‘It’s past bed-time and no-one has the cognitive capacities to give any more time than required to understand your brand’. Make your brand language as simple as possible. Right now (and always), simple words are best-equipped to cut through the (random promotional) clutter.

Stop selling for a bit - Just communicate.

I have used this statement quite a few times in the past few weeks – ‘The current crisis is unprecedented’. But then, that’s expected from a crisis. There is no precedent on how to do things.

We, as startups, are pushed to ABS - ‘Always Be Selling’. However, that’s not the flavor of the season.

You must have heard – ‘We are all in this together’. It’s true. People all around the world are facing a similar set of uncertainties and hardships. It’s an uplifting thought which, despite its somber backdrop, adds a vague sense of security and serenity. It’s a common thread connecting everyone.

Now, some marketers, still preoccupied with trend-hopping, are excited about this thread. They want to connect their brand to the crisis fightback in any credible or far-fetched manner. In their minds, it brings higher ‘engagement’ and ‘reach’.

For the love of God, DABS - ‘Don’t Always Be Selling’.

• Just communicate.
• Open up an impartial and personalized exchange with your followers and audience.
• Take a break from direct social media promotional strategies.
• Tone down the corporate and sales language. Make it more humane.
• Engage with other (even competitor) brands in a bid to bring conformity and sense within the industry.

Understand the (updated) client needs – immediate and future-facing

You must have your preset consumer personas which, let’s face it, predominantly factor CXOs. Startups, some with good reason, try to focus on high-ticket enterprise clients. This is an old ‘high-risk and high-reward’ gambit. Startups safely assume that the product stickiness, the monthly recurring revenue, and the referrals are higher with enterprises.

However, this singular dedication to presets, whether they are customer personas or target clients, must be revisited. You and your clients are facing the same three-pronged issue:

1. Business continuity
2. Escalating overhead
3. Market uncertainty

As a marketer, you must look beyond your off-hand company pitch and adopt a collaborative approach. Engage with your clients to help them find quicker ways to ride off the current storm.

Let’s take an example. You send one of your prospects one of these emails:

a.     Cut down cart abandon rates by half – Ask us how

b.     We want to help improve your remote work coordination

In any normal (not a crisis) scenario, the first mailer title would have higher open rates and greater responses. However, in a crisis, the client (and your point of contact at the company) have updated priorities and concerns. These concerns go beyond mere ‘cart abandonment rates’.

Recognizing these updated client needs and offering a collaborative and consultative hand would improve the open and response rates.

• Also read: Top 7 most common brand mistakes for startups

Keep Calm and, please, Keep it Simple!

You may say that the points mentioned are obvious. Still, just because something is obvious doesn’t make it impractical. We have developed a false belief wherein complicated and multi-faceted campaigns are better than simple ones. What happened to ‘KISS’? Keep it simple, Se?or.

Many startups have continually pushed agility and responsiveness as their core strengths. Startups have tried hard to inculcate these skills into their workforce by:

• pushing teams out of their comfort zones,
• running 24-hour hackathons for some charming and some ‘smart-aleck’ solutions,
• gamifying the entire learning and development process, etc.

It’s time to channel the KISS principle with true agility and responsiveness. Startups should build their campaigns from the ground-up, go back to the drawing board, and really ‘empathize’ with their prospects.

‘This crisis, too, shall pass’. The startups that fall-upwards during this crisis would be much stronger at the end of it.