NCET Biz Tips: Creating Meaningful Engagement During a Crisis
Ira Gostin
There are four crucial steps that the marketer, entrepreneur or business owner must take to begin creating meaningful engagement. These steps are:
Understand the goals you want to achieve. You can’t create any marketing strategy without clearly stated goals.
Research your audience or audiences, specific to your business. Creating your stakeholder list and identifying the nuances of that audience are so helpful in how you craft your communications.
Have a call to action. You have to tell your audience what they need to do once they engage with you.
Simply ask the question, “How may I help you?”
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were all inundated with emails from every brand and company we had ever given our email to. “During these tumultuous times…,” “In an uncertain time…,” “Dear valued customer…”
The emails continued for weeks. Most were insincere, unauthentic or canned. There is nothing like receiving an email from a company you shopped with once and were addressed as “Dear [Name here].”
Fast forward a couple months into the dumpster fire of 2020, and our news is no longer dominated by “murder hornets” and Covid-19: our country is under attack from the inside out.
The senseless death of a black American citizen followed by the meaningless attacks on our cities and businesses has left us speechless. So how, as capitalists, business owners and entrepreneurs do we regain our voice and create meaningful dialogue during these crises?
In my consultancy, we practice communications through stakeholder engagement. That is we identify all of the stakeholders of an entity and then develop a plan to communicate to, or engage with, each of the stakeholder groups.
During a radio interview a couple years ago, I said that “communications is the voice of business success,” and it’s very true today.
Your communications must be sincere and directed towards your specific audience. Sensitive communications can’t be broad and all encompassing, it has to be geared towards a specific audience. That means segmenting your list to customers, non-customers, baby boomers and millennials. Each audience has different “what’s in it for me” expectations.
The lines in marketing are blurred. Where traditional marketing ends and public relations overlaps; corporate communications intersects and has an overlay of advertising; add in social media and digital marketing; this all can cause confusion and a lack of results. Marketing 2.0 with measurable outputs and results are the transition to Marketing 3.0 in this modern era.
For business, effective communications is paramount towards moving the enterprise forward. All businesses require growth and forward momentum to succeed. This even applies to not-for-profit entities. If you are not moving forward, goes the adage, you are moving backwards. In our practice, we call this growth and forward momentum Moving the Needle.
Get even more ideas to communicate your business during Ira’s presentation, Creating Meaningful Engagement during a Crisis” webinar at NCET’s online Biz Cafe at 3:00 P.M. on July 29, 2020. NCET is a member-supported nonprofit organization that produces educational and networking events to help people explore business and technology. More info at www.NCETcafe.org.
Ira. M Gostin, MBA, APR is an entrepreneur and strategic communications and marketing consultant through his business, Gostin Strategic, (www.iragostin.com) a Reno-based consultancy serving global clients. Ira was named Most Influential Marketing Executive for Nevada in 2018 by Acquisitions International.