Why You Need Marketing to Bounce Back Quickly from COVID-19

If you’re thinking about cancelling your marketing, we’re asking, “What’s the Plan?”.  Price Waterhouse Cooper measures recovery from COVID-19 in years, not months, so, if you’re thinking day-to-day, you could be really extending your recovery.

  • Keep up your marketing to prepare for an immediate bounce back with your marketing presence
  • Losing your marketing could mean losing customers and market share – costly in time and profit margins – present and future
  • Manage the lull and be proactive in client/patient management and acquisition
  • Keep up your marketing to generate new leads
  • Keep up your marketing to understand the customer and competitor change as it happens

Hypothetical Scenario 1: Your number of walk-ins have dropped and your cancellations have probably increased. In a panic you might cancel your marketing spend to increase coverage of expenses.

What about the long term? Marketing is not just about increasing profits, it’s about keeping your presence, staying in contact and finding new leads.

Let’s look at Why You Need Marketing to Bounce Back Quickly from COVID-19: 4 Best Case Scenarios.

Best Case Scenario 1: Immediate Bounce Back

The fastest and most efficient way to bounce back is by keeping up your marketing. Recovering starts with a strategy focussed on the short-term and the long-term.  Letting go of your marketing now is likely to delay the rate at which you bounce back. The table, below summarises the difference marketing can make for now and the not-so-distant future.

No Marketing Marketing
  • Reduce expenses to fund running costs
 →
  • Increase cash flow need to meet and exceed running costs
  • Lose market presence
 →
  • Retain market presence
  • Lose contacts from customer and lead base
 →
  • Gain leads and stay in contact with existing customers
  • Lose sight of what and how the customer/market changes
 →
  • Track and monitor what and how the customer/market changes
  • Lose market share to current and new competitors
 →
  • Gain market share from current competitors and prepare for new market entrants (post COVID-19)
  • Delay in returning to normal
 →
  • Immediate return to normal
  • Find your customer base has been intercepted by a competitor during COVID-19 ‘hibernation’
 →
  • New leads and customers to contact with detailed information about purchase intentions
  • Need to rebuild and mend customer base while competitors
 →
  • Database is up-to-date and well informed at return of ‘normal’

Best Case Scenario 2: Proactive Patient or Client Management and Planning

When business returns to normal (the new normal), have a plan. Don’t wait to create leads. Patients are searching for services, so help them to find you.

→  If you cut your marketing now, how will you be found?

Creating a waitlist of customer inquiries will put prospective leads in a sales funnel, ready to action by your admin or sales team when regular services resume.

→ If you stop your marketing now, how long will it take to find new clients or patients while you attend to the backlog of non-essential services?

We recommend the use of an enquiry form and a waitlist. This way, you know who they are, exactly what services or products they’re interested in.

  • Create new leads with a waitlist. We explain these in more detail, here.
  • Manage current patients or clients by planning how you’ll optimise scheduling the backlog of non-essential services.

Pausing your marketing probably means a pause in communication.

→  How will you keep your contacts up-to-date if you’re not in contact with them?

Best Case Scenario 3: Understand the Change as it Happens

Keeping Up Your Marketing Means Keeping the Customer Journey Tracked 

Disengaging with your marketing right now means that you’re losing invaluable information just as the game changes.

With the right metrics in place, you can objectively measure leads on your landing page i.e. the digital version of a ‘walk-in’. That’s why on our end, we measure every step of the customer journey and custom build landing pages to ensure that the data we monitor is clean, accurate and up to date.

Keeping Up Your Marketing Could Mean Gaining Competitor’s Market Share

At the very least, maintaining your marketing will allow you to track your clients’ behaviour as we all change in response to the new normal.

In the best of circumstances, as other players reduce their spend and withdraw their marketing, you could actually increase your share of the market and reach of voice.

You could be surprised at what’s happening behind the scenes – did you know that in some industries cost per click has actually gone down because so many businesses are withdrawing their marketing spend?

How can we evolve unless we plan?

Planning for the future is important. Especially in times like these, where resources are being poured into keeping up-to-date and implementing changes.

It’s time to look beyond present limitations and plan for recovery.

At YEWS and Practice Results, we are focussed on the future and the future is bright for our digital channels.

If you would like more information or have any questions about how we’re planning for COVID-19 recovery please get in touch.

Originally published on Practice Results blog on 14/4/2020