Marketing Post-COVID: Client Stories & Changing Strategies

Just like every organization around the world, our clients’ businesses and nonprofit organizations were profoundly and permanently affected by COVID-19. From a marketing standpoint, where did clients make changes to react quickly? How have we been helping them pivot, and what’s proven most effective? Here are the overarching themes and marketing post-COVID lessons learned while navigating — across industries, organization size, type and employee culture.

Where did our clients engage in an immediate response?

• Assessing and adjusting active social media messaging for sensitivity and relevance
• Adapting tactics to go virtual for immediate upcoming in-person events
• Quick-turn content development (both customer and sales enablement). It focused on how to navigate remote work, necessary technology and collaboration tools, professional development tips and industry-specific challenges
• Proactive public relations (PR) and media outreach activities. Particularly for clients in the healthcare, telehealth, manufacturing and professional development spaces.

How are organizations seeing their business change long-term and shifting their marketing strategy in turn?

• Customer and Market Insights: Changing customer needs (and industry-specific changes) require more in-depth market and customer intelligence. Our clients are leaning on us more to lend insights on changing market dynamics in technology, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, small business, financial services, nonprofit and transportation — and how to respond and adapt in their marketing post-COVID.
• Events: We’ve been helping clients reassess strategy for upcoming and longer-term events, including new ideation for lead generation. They are also incorporating creative ways to connect via social media and video. Additionally, we’re helping them develop plans to engage customers in new ways virtually in the longer-term.
• Content Strategy and Development: The content we’ve been advising on and creating is focused on key topics of support. That includes: remote work, remote learning, workforce challenges, supporting employees/professional development, safety/health, supply chain, new and shifting technology needs, telehealth and how to help customers navigate the unique and unprecedented needs in their industry.
• Messaging and Audience Personalization: We’re incorporating more audience personalization and industry specificity than ever before for clients. Much is due to a greater need for sensitivity to unique industry and organizational nuances and a more human tone.
• Integrated Campaigns and Proactive Engagement: We’ve seen an uptick in asks for integrated campaign development and proactive strategy. In particular, for email, sales enablement, PR and social media to better reach customers where they are.

Keep reading to see how we applied these shifting marketing strategies to real-life client needs. 

Client Stories: Marketing Post-COVID

Vaya Group 

Launching a new solution can be challenging. It’s even harder during a pandemic, and establishing credibility is crucial. For Vaya Group and their solution Vayability, there was an additional layer to address in marketing post-COVID. That was the need to create key work from home (WFH) messaging to address COVID-19 news and its impact to industries, companies, workforces, and individuals. The company tapped OMS for an integrated marketing communications program that set out to accomplish multiple objectives, including: 

• Position Vaya Group as a serious player in the talent management and leadership development arena. That included aligning to timely industry trends, including late-breaking COVID-19 news and WFH ramifications.
• Introduce Vaya Group and Vayability to media targets to build relationships and set a path for future media opportunities
• Secure media coverage from target outlets to reach core audiences 
• Create a presence for Vaya Group, Vayability, and Vaya’s CEO on social channels (specifically LinkedIn; also company and solution Twitter accounts)
• Drive traffic to Vayability and Vaya Group websites and encourage content engagement

Based on the above objectives, OMS developed key messages and content (e.g. a press release, infographic, Q&A, blog and WFH messaging). We also established and continues to manage organic social and executive social media programs. Finally, we continue proactive media outreach and engagement with tier-1 local, national and trade publications and a growing social media presence. Activities from the launch included both print and radio placements — including a WGN interview with Vaya Group’s CEO on leading through a crisis and WFH advice — reached over 210,000 decision-makers.

physIQ

Well before our lives changed due to coronavirus, physIQ pioneered an FDA-cleared, novel approach to monitoring high-risk heart patients’ health through a remote monitoring solution called pinpointIQ. Fast-forward to February 2020, physIQ’s mission grew — and fast. It was clear physIQ could help keep high-risk COVID-19 patients resting at home and monitor the health of essential healthcare providers on the frontline. Once a slight change in vital signs occurs, physicians are alerted and a rapid care plan is instituted. This meant high-risk patients can be safe at home under a physician’s close watch. Ultimately that can reduce exposure to others so healthcare providers can focus on treating very ill patients.  

physIQ is working with a number of organizations including U.S. Veterans Affairs, U.S. Department of Defense, Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, Purdue University, as well as several local and national hospital systems to study and deploy the pinpointIQ system. Our challenge was to promote physIQ’s capabilities and engagement with organizations to the medical and healthcare media through a dynamic news engine with multi-channel deployment. 

Recent media placements about physIQ’s important work include an ABC News feature about a partnership between physIQ and the Pentagon that helps identify people with COVID-19 before any symptoms appear. Another placement in Becker’s Health IT focused on Purdue University’s $500,000 investment in physIQ intended to help the company change the way healthcare is developed and delivered through FDA-cleared physiology analytics. Other recent coverage was in U.S. Medicine and featured an important study where physIQ’s AI analytics platform along with a wearable biosensor patch predicted heart failure patient readmissions to VA hospitals up to 7-10 days in advance.

Forward Steps 

Forward Steps is a Colorado-based nonprofit offering a comprehensive, individualized program for current and former foster youth. All youth finishing high school and heading out into the world need support. Most rely on family. Youth aging out of foster care can rely on Forward Steps to help with financial assistance, mentoring and professional and personal development workshops. 

Many nonprofit organizations were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and have needed to shift their marketing post-COVID. This year’s #GivingTuesdayNow was bumped up to May 5 to create a platform to help nonprofits get the word out about their needs. 

Forward Steps came to OMS with the need to reach its donor base with unique messaging during these unprecedented times. We were able to help the team create an email + social campaign aligning with Giving Tuesday. 

The OMS team helped Forward Steps raise over $7,000 from the 3-week campaign.

Multi-brand Technology Solutions Provider 

Attending a large industry event as a speaker and major exhibitor is no small feat. It includes a phenomenal amount of planning by many teams, from Events to Sales to Social Media. So what happens when the biggest healthcare technology conference you’re attending and speaking at gets cancelled a few days before due to COVID-19? You pivot your marketing post-COVID…HARD. OMS helped this client deliver formerly in-booth expert discussions to the same audience consuming #VirtualHIMSS online. How? By creating live recordings of the same content by working closely with the speakers to record pre-promo videos teasing the upcoming live-sessions. We also live-tweeted the sessions and heavily promoted the content post-event. 

The results? A performance that actually GREW year-over-year! Not only did we have almost 7,000 video views of our two LinkedIn Live videos, but we also increased our key metrics y-o-y. From over 1.2 million impressions to over 25,000 engagements, this client’s Virtual HIMSS was a turn-lemons-into-lemonade, great success!

And what #VirtualHIMSS set the stage for the ability to plan around and further develop an informed event strategy and objectives for completely-virtual shows. And we’ve done just that with this client’s presence and plan for Cisco Live 2020. Stay tuned for an update on the activities and results for that show in a future OMS Client Round-up!

 

Have questions about the projects profiled in this blog? Reach out anytime to an Outlook Marketing team member, we’d love to talk.

Did you catch our recent blog about how marketers are changing their approach in response to COVID? In addition, you’ll find some helpful recent content on our blog about how to shift your event virtual, developing integrated campaigns and the importance of storytelling, plus much more! Tell us what you think or any topics you’d like us to cover in future blogs on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. 

 

Authored By: The Outlook Marketing Social Team