Life has changed considerably over the last several weeks. Many of us are under stay-at-home orders and there are policies that are preventing us from going about our lives as usual. The impact on business has been dramatic, and professionals in the field, especially those at a digital marketing agency, are wondering how they can respond.

On one front, marketing professionals have been working from home so the functions of marketing can continue when they can’t go to the office. While this has been helpful, there is a recognition that the business landscape has changed and marketing departments will have to adjust. Plans that were on track a few months ago may no longer be relevant, so many of us will need to look into coronavirus resources for businesses and find ways to adapt to the new reality. 

Marketers are going to play a vital role in helping businesses adapt during the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses may need to make a shift in the types of products they sell or they might need to change their messaging to reach customers or clients in a way that is more likely to resonate in light of the new reality.

The following are a few of the steps and strategies for marketers and business leaders who are trying to figure out what they can do to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

Keep Your Clients and Customers Up to Date

Whether you are a business selling products, a B2B service provider or a marketing professional, you have to stay in close contact with your customers and clients at this time. Along with that, you have to acknowledge the current circumstances. If you try to carry on like things are normal, you are going to seem out of touch and unprepared.

Let them know what you are doing to respond to the crisis and assure them that you can still meet their needs. Make sure they know you can develop plans to help their businesses during this difficult time. 

You should also stay in touch so you can learn about the challenges they are facing. Ask them about what they need from you and what you can do to better support their mission. 

This contact can be in the form of phone calls or through email, but you should also make sure to keep people informed by posting on social media and by releasing information on your website. 

Assess Your Market Position 

It is actually a great time to reassess and adjust your market position. People are staying at home and using the internet more than they normally would, so this offers the perfect opportunity to get new messaging out there. 

Start by looking at your ideal customer. Is it the same person it was a few months ago or last year? Consider how your product or service is going to benefit your customers and think of ways to demonstrate the benefits. With an understanding of who your customer is and how they can benefit from your product or service, you can create messaging that will resonate and inspire action.

Once you know your ideal customer and the value proposition you are offering, you should consider your market positioning strategy. Do you want to be a cost leader by offering the most competitive prices on the market? Maybe you want to differentiate your brand and target a segment of the market. You could also consider combining these two positioning strategies together.

Adjust Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you have established an ideal customer and you know how you want to position your brand, you can start developing a marketing strategy to meet your goals. 

Take a look at the audience you are pitching to. What is their age group? Are you selling primarily to men or women? Are you selling to businesses or consumers? Does your ideal customer fit into a specific income range? What are their interests? 

The list of questions could go on. The more specific you get, the easier it will be to target the right customers with the right messaging. It will also help you select the right marketing strategy and the marketing channels that will be most effective when trying to reach the customers you want to reach.

Prepare for the Future

Finally, this is a good time to prepare your marketing strategy for the “what ifs”. Most of us did not see the coronavirus coming, and that left us scrambling to react without much of a plan. Now is the time to try to forecast what may happen, run some tests and make plans for different possible outcomes.

Look at different timelines for the economy in your area reopening. Consider the possibility that some of these timelines might change and try to project what the impact will be on your business for different scenarios. Maybe run some market research and try to project the numbers for things like expenses and revenues. Think about how your marketing strategy will need to change to respond to different outcomes and the messaging you will need to have ready for these events.

Marketing won’t be able to solve every problem that businesses experience as the result of the coronavirus, but it should play an important part in the response. By reviewing your marketing strategy and making the necessary adjustments, you can keep your business in the minds of customers and reassure them that you can continue to meet their needs.

If  we don’t take into consideration today’s fuss about influencer marketing strategies and take a look at the history we will see that influencer marketing has even started before the creation of social media. The definition of the “influencer” is a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media. Clear message and easy to understand but is it? Can anybody be an influencer? 

What makes a Person an Influencer

Beautiful minds inspire others. Just think, do we like influencers just because we want to be like them?  The answer is  yes for some of us, but for the rest of us, we value the effort they put in their work. The influencers inspire us to be the best version of ourselves, do the right thing in every condition and keep pushing our boundaries.

The influencers take action deliberately. They don’t have magic sticks which make all of their dreams come true. They build their name bit by bit. No matter if we call them content creators, mentors, guides, experts or anything like that, they all serve to the same purpose. Creating the impact they were aiming for is their solemn duty.

Honesty saves everyone’s time. Indeed it does. Would you rely on someone who lies to you? Possibly there isn’t any worse thing for  an influencer to tell a lie and get caught. Because once it happens that influencer’s credibility flies out of the window and it’s unlikely to repair again. The reputation is the essence of the influencer’s ability to influence.

This is not a controversial matter, whether or not you have a great thought or actions, if you have people who think like you, in another word if they can relate with you, these people will follow you. However was this always like that? Let’s have a look at the dusty pages of history.

The Blonde Bombshell was on Duty

The Blonde Bombshell, Marilyn Monroe skyrocketed the sales of Chanel №5. In April 1952, Marilyn Monroe appeared for the first time on the cover of Life Magazine, and the article mentions her answer to the question, “What do you wear to bed?” and her reply, “a few drops of Chanel №5”.

Now when we see one or another celebrity praise a perfume it’s quite normal, but Marilyn Monroe was the first celebrity who was endorsing a perfume. Chanel №5 is the most famous and best selling perfume but the popularity of the icon escalated in the twinkling of an eye. 

After that brands discovered the way to use the power of popularity and public images of the celebrities they use it unceasingly. That was easier to entice potential customers with the personalization of celebrities’ looks and their ways of living. 

A Long Way from Down to the Top

Have you heard about Nancy Green? She was one of the first African American models in history to become the face of a popular food product. She didn’t have a beautiful body to show off, we can’t call her a scholar because she was’t. Nancy was a slave, then nanny and cook finally an influencer who fight against the racial discrimination. 

In 1889 Nancy Green was hired to promote a brand called “Aunt Jemima”. The product itself was out of ordinary for its time, self-rising pancake flour with a Black woman’s face on the box  made an instant hit across the country. If we look at the 21st century’s individual’s perspective, yes the design may seem racial and stereotypical nevertheless it was innovative for the 1880s. Green made the big chunk of money while working for the brand for 33 years until her unexpected death. Moreover she became one of the most influential advocates who spoke out against poverty and equal rights.

“Because They’re Worth It”

If you go out and ask a random person who is the second person did a revolutionary act in any case for the first time, it would be doubtful that you will find the right answer. However, we know our pioneers. In 1971, when women didn’t even have a voice over the product specifically manufactured for them, L’Oréal made something groundbreaking. Those days were special for the women’s rights movement  but still advertising controlled by men and women were completely left out.

“Because I’m Worth It” said brand ambassador Joanne Dusseau for the first time and it changed the views of women forever. Some sources claim that L’Oréal came up with this tagline because they wanted to beat their competitor Clairol and encourage women to spend more money on their product. Well, it worked. Because in the 70s almost every commercial featured male actors and showed their perspectives. If you take a look at Clairol’s ads in the 1970s you will see women with a male voiceover. However in the L’Oréal advertisement we see a woman who narrates that she  bought  a premium beauty product for the first time just for herself. The tagline slightly changed over the course of history and evolved its latest form, “ Because You’re Worth It”. Yet no matter how you comprehend it the slogan has been translated into 40 languages and it gave women confidence when they didn’t use to feel they are worth it. L’Oréal didn’t just became the pioneer in feminist advertising, more importantly it influenced the women’s outlooks about themselves.

It doesn’t matter who was the first influencer or when  exactly influencing has started. What we are making of it is the thing we need to focus on and thrive. Try to be a better influential leader to relate and impact others in a deep and sincere way.

Interacting with influencers from the digital realm rather than the real-world, may sound like a sci-fi movie scenario, but in fact, this is where the influencer marketing heading with ultra-speed or is it already there? The answer is YES. Virtual and Augmented Reality is the future of influencer marketing. VR and AR are becoming mainstream media faster than you realize. As well as the fast emergence of social media, it challenges businesses to “stay up-to-date or die”. It’s no surprise that the predicted combined size of AR and VR industries is over $29.5 billion by 2020. It’s only a matter of time before every company is using some form of AR, VR, or both.

Influencer marketing is an inseparable part of digital marketing. Although the use of influencer marketing for B2B is not very common in practice, it’s growing into a new trend. Partnering with influencers on B2B is a much more complicated process. For B2C seeing the results of working with influencers is immediate while for B2B evaluating the effectiveness of collaboration takes a long time, as influencers cannot make a story or a video post about taste, style of the product. 

Finding the relevant influencer for B2B is also different from B2C. For effective marketing strategy industry experts, and real influencers are needed. There are several factors that business need to consider once they are willing to collaborate with influencers:

• Active use of social media. There should not be a long pause between influencers’ posts.
• Finding on topic influencers. The ones that rarely post about related business may not give high ROI.
• Focusing on the right social media channel. Instagram may not be an effective platform for marketing tech products. 

So what is the right strategy to collaborate with influencers on B2B? Here are several strategies that will move the needle in any industry and for companies of all sizes.

Look for existing advocates

To find their “fresh” advocates companies should look nowhere but inside their existing ecosystems. Often, relevant influencers are already somehow associated with your brand. After identifying why you want to carry out B2B Influencer Marketing the next step is to carefully analyze and asses your current customers, business partners, fans and employees for proof of influence and advocacy. With the help of online tools, you can examine the influence of everyone around your brand on social channels that can generate exceptional insights. 

Collaboration with micro and nano influencers

Brands usually tend to partner with influencers that are more famous and have a larger audience. Instead of working with mega-influencers, business needs to consider micro and nano influencers, as they are more engaged in social media. Their small but engaged audience creates credibility and more in touch relations between followers and other influencers. Apart from this, micro-influencers are cost-effective from a marketing perspective. 

Co-create content with industry experts 

Expertise from the influencers to create and launch new products. Word-of-mouth does not work all the time. For big business decisions, you need more in-depth research and real users. Industry experts are one way to increase awareness about the product or service. Working with influencers not only for advertising but also during the production process, guest-posting on influencers’ blogs, showing real-life experience over promoted product. This approach provides a natural distribution channel for your content and builds credibility. 

Leverage employee advocacy

Social media is the main assistant for employee advocacy. In fact, employees are more active on social media users than the corporate accounts and they have more followers than their employers. Resharing the company posts get more click than the original post. Employees are internal influencers for your company. They have an organic audience and real connections for your business. Because employees work on the given product, they can effectively share their knowledge and experience in real life as well. 

While companies still face difficulties in finding the right influencer campaigns, we can mention a few of the successful influencer campaigns.

Dell Influencer Marketing Programs

This one is a good example of B2B Influencer Marketing. But instead of partnering with influencers, Dell works with industry experts for increasing brand leadership such as guest blog posts, podcast interviews and inviting influencers to Dell events. Dell launched the “Dell Luminaries” podcast which worldwide tech experts share their views over different topics from technology to Formula One. Through the program, the business can see and analyze the importance of technology for every business which in turn, will help Dell to reach more business partners. Outside expert views on innovative technology bring new audiences for both, Dell and influencers. The shared value of influencer programs are vital for Dell’s partnership, said Dell marketing expert. 

Prophix – Adapt & Innovate: AI and the Next Evolution of Finance

As a global corporate performance management software, Prophix intended to build leadership in the tech applied finance industry. The company intended to make business analyze the role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to amplify its future position. Prophix created microsite called Adapt & Innovate: AI and the Next Level of Finance where expert influencers and AI personality Penny answering customers’ questions. The site included blog posts, insight infographics, promotional emailing for influencers to share. Virtual Financial Analyst eliminates time spent on repetitive and manual tasks, gives quick analysis for finance professionals. 

3M Science Champions 

3M has done the biggest science research, the State of Science Index to increase everyone’s access to the depth and complexities of science. Featuring twenty-one experts and influencers “Science Champions” podcast launched in relation to the research. 

For successful B2B experience on influencer marketing, detailed market research and expert comments are vital. The key factor here is, creating credibility in customers’ eyes. Instead of traditional marketing, expanding business networks with internal experts as brand advocates and outside experts is more viable. If you want to give Influencer Marketing a try with us just click the “Register” button below with the respective category.