4 tips for marketing in a post-COVID-19 NZ 

The pandemic has impacted almost everything we do and how we act.  And though we’ve now returned to some semblance of normalcy, the consumer landscape remains different – focuses have changed.  Consumerism habits have changed.  Preferences for shopping online vs. in-store have changed.  People are living simpler lives, and marketing to them has become all the more difficult.

With these changes in behaviour (compounded by a 5+ week lockdown) has come an inevitable economic downturn, so companies are now desperate to figure out how to re-secure the business of their customers.  Here are some suggestions for the four areas marketing departments should prioritise in a post-COVID-19 world:

1.  Understand your customers

Not only do you need to understand who your customers are (demographics, location, preferences etc.), you need to have visibility into how they’ve been interacting with your business, both before the outbreak and since.  For example, your existing digital customers will have been joined by a whole new group of new-to-digital customers who previously only interacted in person and will behave and need to be treated very differently in your digital and triggered communications.  This change will require you to understand customers’ new value to your business, considering who were your most valuable customers before the pandemic, and who are now.

2.  Focus on retention and loyalty – not acquisition

Do customers want to be aggressively sold to right now?  Instead of pushing hard for new acquisitions,  marketing energies should be focused on improving, or at least retaining, customer lifetime value and brand loyalty.  Based on what you know of your customers, what can you do to keep them loyal, or re-engage with them (if they’ve dropped off the map)?  Can you alter your loyalty programme to account for the change in customer behaviour?

3.  Personalise across all channels

Customers have increasingly high expectations for personalised content, and the changes in behaviours brought about through the pandemic has accelerated this.  If COVID-19 caused your business to shift more energy towards an online sales platform, personalisation across different mediums should be a top priority.  It is more important than ever that you should interact with customers showing empathy – that you recognise them, understand them and value them.

4.  Connect the touch-points for maximum visibility and ease of execution

All of the different touch-points your business has need to work together to make for solid marketing ground.  If you’ve got information siloed in different places across your business, you need an efficient way to bring the important bits together to exchange and merge data quickly and efficiently.  The use of this data will enable you to understand customers, their journeys, their interactions and their value and will allow you to show a consistent message across all of the ways you interact with them.