Building stronger bonds with your customers during and after COVID-19
Branding has evolved and organizations are facing a lot of new challenges in managing their brand’s reputations, which now requires a strategic and interdisciplinary measure. Understanding and monitoring how covid-19 has already affected and also likely to affect brands in the future, is a duty which must come from the perspective of all the actors involved.
With the current reality of Covid- 19, it obvious that a global crisis can paralyze or galvanize an organization to either thrives or collapses.
Covid-19 may have forced many businesses to pivot, as it has created a no-win situation for many businesses. In trying to build stronger bond with your customers, you do not have to change, but stand on your core brand
Here are some guidelines to help you build stronger bonds with your customers throughout the pandemic and beyond:
Know that marketing during this time, will be different, and know also that social media is key to drawing customers back to your business. As you are bouncing back to business, update everything that concerns you on Google Business, website and all social media bios with business information, if possible, pin a tweet to the top of your Twitter feed, and a post on your Facebook page to make it easy for customers to find information about your business hours.
Some companies are cutting back on marketing while some are more strategic and are coming up with interesting ways of engaging their audience during this difficult time. If you still want to stay in business, you have to balance financial responsibility with the need to keep consumers informed and engaged when things are no longer the way they used to be.
As a big brand that you are, bear in mind that, reopening is another opportunity to proactively and authentically serve your customers in a way that aligns with your company’s values by staying true to your mission statement.
Try and build momentum on your first day of opening by creating a social media event and hosting a countdown, as you may not need to celebrate your re-opening due to Covid-19 directives, and many are still scared of mingling in this period, but sharing your activities on Facebook and Instagram with videos will go a long way to excite customers to be eager to do business with your firm again.
Relying on assumptions is not needed at this time, know that any data you have few months back is no longer needed, it is out-of-date, you must be up-and-doing in monitoring changes in your customer behaviours and purchasing needs, while the crisis last.
In trying to make profit during this period, remember not to alienate the customer base that has helped you to get where you are, focus more on how you can uniquely serve your customers now, do not be discouraged even if it does not yield profit in the short term.
Building a resilient brand begins with establishing a resilient culture. Always make space and time for customer’s feedback, it is very important to hear from them, because hearing their needs can help your brands determine the best steps to take, as you must always centre your marketing around your customers and not on yourself.
Finally, staying true to who you are is also important, do not jump trends , or adopt a radically new brand idea, while trying to be everything which you are not, can also ring false for your customers.
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