Marketing in Lockdown
Getting the most out of all you’ve got - marketing tasks to conduct during lockdown.
Strange times right now, aren’t they?
This lockdown brings with it many disadvantages for the pharmaceutical marketer. but with a little strategic thinking, this period can also present itself with some cunning opportunities.
Remember your potential customers and clients are still there… and you still need to be in front of them. They’re just not at their desks at the moment. So, don’t hit the pause button; try some of these ideas below.
They may be zero cost but they will keep you top of mind.
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REPURPOSE CONTENT
One really quick and effective marketing tactic to conduct during lockdown is to repurpose your existing content. It’s a simple concept. Take a piece of content you have used for a previous campaign and use it again…and then again.
COPE stands for “create once, publish everywhere.” It's a technique used to publish messages across all communication channels either simultaneously or time-lagged. This is the thinking behind what we are looking to achieve. And that is as much as possible with what we already have.
If you have webinar recordings and podcasts, transcribe them into whitepapers. Videos can be transcribed into blog posts, and brochures can be transcribed into web pages. Gather your interviews into an e-book or share your stats from articles within social posts or even compile your clients’ questions from support in an FAQ.
TAKE STOCK - AUDIT
First, make an audit of all the channels you have. Clearly, all the social media are there but how about the other channels. What groups on LinkedIn are you on? List each one. Lockdown is a great time to do this sort of audit - and any audit for that matter.
Reach out to the sales reps and ask what they use. There will be forums and digital portals for every nook and cranny of your business units. Research them all, and list them all in rows in Excel. Second, audit every piece of content you have. Everything that you have written and put each one in a column. Whitepapers, Case studies, Webinar recordings, Info sheets, articles, podcasts, e-books… get them all in one place.
Now we have every channel you own, as well as every piece of content. Once you have this table, it is a simple task of ensuring each piece of content is distributed across each channel. Bulk schedule. Be strategic about timings and releasing them across a week or so and make sure you note what content went where. This will be good for the analysis later on.
CREATE FOLLOW-ON CONTENT
PT Barnum said: “Always leave them wanting more.” Never a truer word in marketing. Whatever content you have, try and link it to another piece of content which increases in complexity. Linking content is a really smart idea because you are building a strategic user journey for website visitors to take, using content you already have.
For instance, if you have a previous webinar that has been repurposed into a compelling narrative for the whitepaper, make sure the whitepaper went further to add details that couldn’t make their way into the webinar at the time of recording, such as a case study and some research papers. This can be re-sent out to all the attendees that came to the original webinar.
GATE (OR NO GATE), MEASURE AND TRACK
We wouldn’t recommend gating any of this content (although judge each piece of content on its individual merit – the more valuable it is, the more likely you are to gate it). The reason for this is that this content is repurposed, rather than original - doing so could undervalue your new content.
When gating (if appropriate), always use the rule that the higher value the content – the more you can ask on the form in return. People won’t part with 10 pieces of info about themselves for an infographic, but they may be happy to part with 4 or 5 pieces of info for a high-value webinar transcript with follow up whitepaper.
DIVE INTO ANALYTICS
If you have a dedicated URL for your website content, which I’m sure you will, Google Analytics will be able to measure clicks.
Google Analytics will also be able to gather intelligence on the click destination. So if you published that whitepaper on a LinkedIn Group on the 1st June, careful examination of GA will provide you with the number of people landing on that page of content on the days following, and how many clicks came from LinkedIn.
During this lockdown period, I also think that diving into Google Analytics to get to know/use the platform a little more is a great idea. Setting up Goals and Events for the above, as well as for other content and website journeys will tell you a little more about how successful you are with funnelling visitors through to the content you have created.
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CONNECT WITH EDITORS
A good idea is to try the Editors. If you have good content that’s informative, useful, non-salesy, problem-solving and well written, it can’t hurt to send it off to a few editors within a personalised email. Of course, you can’t guarantee this gets placed within any magazine or website, but it ticks a very important box. Your future content might get featured or you might get an opportunity to contribute to similar articles in the future.
Lockdown is a great time to conduct some outreach activity, generally. To get the most out of your content, start with the editors and then perhaps work through other media outlets and blogs.
REVIEW YOUR FOLLOW-UP ACTIONS
Finally, ensure all content has a CTA, or follow up action. If it’s to a secondary piece of content as discussed earlier, great. If not, ask them to join your mailing list for your newsletter, or to follow you on social media. Every touchpoint is a win for you.
And once they have taken the initial follow-up action which you set, create another follow-up action. Triggers can be created within your marketing automation systems that send emails when certain actions are taken by the user. You might even want to send a personal email in this respect, rather than sending a bulk-style email.
MARKETING IN LOCKDOWN
So, a couple of easy steps that shouldn’t take too long for you to undertake during this lockdown period that could really help keep you top of mind in these challenging times. And there are plenty of other things to do by reviewing what you already have.
Dive into that content and assess how and when it can be repurposed and reused to get the most out of all you’ve got. Your marketing activities during the COVID-19 crisis will have no doubt shifted and now might be the appropriate time to assess what you currently have and discover new opportunities and avenues to promote that content further.