Coronavirus spreading: how to adjust your SaaS marketing?
POST UPDATED ON 3/14 to incorporate new recommendations and courses of actions from business and marketing leaders.
A marketing manager shared last week that her team was scrambling, unsurprisingly, to cancel their presence at 50 to 60 conferences where they were going to exhibit to drive leads, due to the COVID-19 outbreak. They are working hard to recoup what they can: sponsor fees, booth production and setup, T&E, etc. Meanwhile, Sales are concerned: where will our leads come from? And that’s just events. Prospects and customers will likely slow down and cancel some purchasing decisions. Moreover, Sales won’t be able to travel to see them face to face. etc. In other words, it's time for Marketing to plan ahead and adjust to the new realities of the health and economic risks of the Coronavirus.
Below is a look at some impact and opportunities by marketing roles.
Guidance for Product Marketing
Product Marketers should quickly partner with Sales and Customer Success to understand if and how your prospects and customers will adjust their purchase process and budgets. Start by interviewing or surveying your Sales and CSMs since they are on the front line. Pay special attention to the verticals that will likely be the hardest hit in your portfolio: Travel, Hospitality, Retail, etc.
Then go and do the same with prospects and customers. Offer to share back what you hear from their peers and how they are planning to adjust.
Focus even more on showing the financial and economic benefits of your solutions, so you come across as value-generating and, more critically, as a source of savings. More than ever it’s time for ROI and TCO calculators as well as customer endorsements that focus on and show savings.
Guidance for Events
It's very likely that the 3rd party events where you are planning on talking and/or exhibiting will get canceled or will welcome fewer attendees. The cancelation list keeps getting longer, with SXSW the latest casualty. States and cities are forbidding gatherings people. Quickly and deeply discount their contribution to your pipeline. Bring them even down to 0 for Q2.
Are you hosting your own events? Quickly decide whether you:
- cancel or postpone your in-person events, the only responsible option for events in the next 3 months
- plan on running them with a smaller footprint and a streaming component if they take place in Q3 or beyond, or
- go all virtual. More on this in this post by Diginomica.
If you decide to proceed, share clear health safety and behavior guidelines (see Forrester example) and often share your decision and updates to attendees.
Of course, with travel getting canceled and employees likely to work from home more, virtual events seem like the way to go… But so does everyone seem to think these days. Invest in an original promo plan and a format that will help all people working from home more connected. We all crave social connections in uncertain times, that we usually would get in the office. Lattice recently was able to get 16k+ registrants for their virtual Resources for Humans Conference. They didn’t skimp on paid ads and they were able to grant SHRM credits to attendees (that makes HR show up).
Picture your customer community also working from home, worried, wondering what to do. They wonder what their peers are doing. It turns out that you have a unique vantage point, with many of them in your client base. It is now your responsibility to connect them, to provide channels where they can share how they are addressing new challenges. Create virtual lunches, coffee or happy hours where you get small groups together in informal video calls that you moderate (send then gift cards for free delivery of pastries, meals, or coffee to show you care and to increase attendance). Be there for them.
Impact on Digital and Performance Spend
Get ready. Your CFO will soon come to you - if that’s not already happened - and ask you to review your spend and very likely cut it by a significant percentage.
Quickly structure your spend along these 3 tiers, so you can be armed for that conversation:
- ROI is unknown or unclear (whether it’s brand, difficult to attribute, etc): that is the first one that will go. Understand the impact of this. Be ready - even recommend - to pause it unless it corresponds to truly strategic priorities and/or you notice that your competition is cutting all their spend.
- ROI known, positive, but under a certain performance threshold (say 3x) - develop a plan to improve its ROI, especially with the bandwidth you may free up from canceling managing the first tier. Be ready to defend it or lose it.
- Your best-performing spend (example: above 3x ROI) - that’s the one you should protect.
As more companies try to make up from lost leads from events, marketers and BDRs will rely even more on email and ads. So open and click rates should suffer as prospects receive and see more emails and ads. Take that into account.
However, it is not clear how CPC will evolve as 2 factors pull costs in different directions: events dollars gets re-assigned to digital (pressure up) but brand and ad spend in general gets slashed (pressure down). It’s time for strategic and nimble media buying!
Opportunity for Content Marketing, Community, and PR
It’s time to produce content that helps your audience understand how the downturn may affect their function specifically and share some guidance with prospects and customers. They must all be struggling to figure out what to do.
You run a community? Then create a channel or topic around “Adjusting to the Coronavirus” so your community can share tips under your “tent” and feel less isolated.
Regarding PR: are you sitting on top of data that journalists covering the virus (i.e. pretty much all publications these days) will want to write about? Structure it and share it with reporters. For instance: aggregated retail data that can show the impact on consumers' store visits or buying patterns. Any travel, commute, remote work, hospitality, or job posting data are highly sought after as well. Work with your data team to produce key insights and share them with reporters.
Impact on Marketing Ops
It’s time to ensure you support your team with: spend analysis, re-planning and budget re-allocation, as well as help them find a robust set of tools for executing and tracking virtual events, as well as working in a distributed fashion, if your IT team is not already on top of that.
Team Management (valid for all functions)
Your team will likely have to work remotely, as offices get temporarily closed or employees prefer working from home to avoid public transportation or attend to sick ones.
You probably have all the tools required to enable that: messaging, video conf, wikis, project management, etc. However, what people often overlook is how documenting everything in writing becomes even more critical. Also, schedule some informal video conf sessions with no other agenda than connecting on a personal level so people don’t feel isolated in a period of increased stress.
Now, could it be time to actually GO BIGGER?
I took over marketing for LinkedIn’s Recruiting Solutions in December 2008. Yes, the beginning of THAT winter. Recruiting? Marketing? The two budgets that typically get cut first. So I thought that was going to sting and growth may slow… Turns out the opposite happened and the growth rate started accelerating. As companies were slashing headhunters budgets quickly, they turned around to our solutions - LinkedIn Recruiter especially. Simply because they allowed corporate recruiters to do what recruiting firms were doing for a lot less money - source “passive" candidates themselves - in the process becoming more indispensable internally.
Are you marketing a solution that is a great more economical alternative to a current more expensive paradigm or incumbent? Is that incumbent likely to get hard hit by the current likely downturn? Then it may be time to build an investment case and go on the offensive. Never let a good crisis go to waste…
What about you, what else are you doing or planning on doing?
PS: Some relevant posts you should check out for more context:
- Sequoia’s Black Swan post
- Tom Tunguz : bullwhip corona.
- Elad Gil on the virus and what it means for startups