Now would be a good time to think about post-pandemic marketing

Any marketing practitioner worth their salt will tell you that there are normally only two factors that will get clients involved with marketing: fear or confidence. Fear, with knee-jerk thinking they have seen in their competitors everywhere, and over-confidence when they sense that their customers have gone into buying mode and spend too much budget. Apart from these two instances, persuading some clients that perhaps letting their customers know they have something to sell to them may not be a bad idea is, in some cases, like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. After all, they know best, don’t they? Of course they do.

I’d like to think that our readers are more balanced, less reckless and less paranoid than the hypothetical (okay, maybe not so hypothetical) examples mentioned above. This last year has been ‘a bad do’ as my dear old Grandfather would have said. Only a few businesses who, probably through no contrivance of their own, found themselves in the right place at the right time, have come through the last twelve months unscathed. Most organisations, us included, have not had a very good year; for our part, we’ve just been ticking over. 

However, not all is doom and gloom just now: if our political masters are to be believed, we’re surging ahead with the vaccine program, and much quicker than our European counterparts, which doubtless induces much Euro-smugness amongst the Brexit minded of us. The result is that here will be some optimism coming, although we don’t know exactly when. Caution will still be the by-word, unless you have a B&B in Cornwall in which case, you should be advertising like Billy-O, as you’ll not have as captive an audience as you will this summer. For the rest of us, just a bit more patience. But for the business owners treading water like everyone else, if you’re not planning your marketing campaign and getting it ready to roll as soon as this does lift, then you darned well should be.

A well thought out campaign needn’t cost a fortune or anything like, but it does need careful planning, not just on the budget side, but also on the timings and choice of media used. Business owners know how the customers in their market are likely to behave, and experience will tell them probable buying patterns, so that too must be brought into the marketing plan, particularly in the timing. If you’re not sure on how to plan to this level of detail, rather than lick your finger and stick it in the air and risk wasting valuable time and budget, speak to us; after all, that’s what we're here for.