Blogs

This ILTA blog post is written by Amy Juers, ILTA PAC member and CEO of Edge Legal Marketing.  
Further, an ILTA Work from Home podcast is associated with this blog post. Work from Home #7, and can be found here.


The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly altered the way companies are doing business across all sectors. As events have been canceled or postponed indefinitely and non-essential employees are working from home, companies have had to quickly adjust to a new normal of remote work and communication.

Even in our digital era, many businesses rely on in-person conferences and meetings to make connections and pursue marketing and business development initiatives. With those opportunities now gone for the foreseeable future, businesses need to rethink their marketing strategies for these new COVID-19 times.

In the past 50 years there have been profound events like 9/11 or the 2008 recession that changed the course and mindset of not only marketers and businesses, but all Americans and the world at large. COVID-19 will go down in history as another one of these “weighty” events. During these moments in history there was notable warning signs that changes to businesses were happening. Often companies would signal that there is trouble ahead by cutting staff and pulling back marketing efforts. A wise man once said that cuts in marketing tends to function as a sort of “canary in the coal mine” – an early indicator of potential danger or failure. Changes like spending cuts and staff reductions in the marketing department serve as warning signs to the rest of the business that bad things might be coming their way.

History tells us that pulling back on marketing, either during COVID-19 or ever, is not the solution. There are ways for marketers to fill the gap created by the current environment so that your marketing department cannot only survive but thrive. Now is not the time to shut marketing down -- it’s the perfect opportunity to overhaul your marketing strategies to create practices that will remain consistent and resilient through the pandemic and beyond.

Rather than being the canary in the coal mine, taking the right marketing steps now will put you in the best possible position when things start to return to normal, so you can be the cat that swallowed the canary.

Here are some immediate, positive, and empowering do’s and don'ts for marketing during COVID-19 and keeping the canary alive.

• DON’T Panic.

These are undoubtedly scary and unprecedented times, but they will pass. Businesses in general, and marketing departments, need to be flexible and adaptable if they want to remain competitive and successful. Today’s challenges present an opportunity to implement strategies and solutions that will continue to serve you well into the future. Panicking is counterproductive and will keep you from achieving your goals.

• DO Revisit Your Disaster Recovery Planning.

COVID-19 may be in the spotlight today, but business disruptions can strike at any time. From natural disasters to security breaches to ransomware attacks, we’ve seen business continuity disrupted time and again in recent years. All businesses need to have a clear business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place, and that plan should address marketing. The current pandemic is an excellent reminder that response planning is the only way to position your company to be able to respond to disruptions and thrive despite them.

• DO Establish a Clear Communications Plan.

 Communications and marketing should be a critical part of any business continuity. This involves coordinating communications across all parts of your business. If missing out on networking opportunities due to event cancelations has you worried about marketing, stop and make note of who you were hoping to speak with or meet at those events and what you were planning to say, and then determine how you can still get those messages across without in-person meetings.

• DO Update Your Contacts List.

Do you have contact information for all the people you were hoping to connect with and are your contacts list updated? Too many companies’ marketing databases are disorganized and not kept up to date. If a complete client contact list exists, it often resides in the billing department, who won’t be the ones handling communications during a disruption. Now is the time to clean up your contacts list and make it easily accessible. If you don’t have a list, make one. It should include internal contacts, clients, and external vendors, and identify your top-tier contacts and clients -- those who are most crucial to reach first.

• DO Decide on Your Crucial Messaging.

Being able to communicate with all necessary parties when a disruption occurs will go a long way toward putting your clients at ease. You need to determine what your most important messages are -- that you’re still up and running, that you’re continuing to serve clients, how you can help them during these difficult times, and that security is being maintained. It’s also a way for you to continue to pursue your marketing efforts and reach your clients. Communications and marketing content will vary depending on the specific circumstance that arises, but you need to be prepared to go with the flow when disruptions happen.

• DON’T Reinvent the Wheel.

Canceled in-person meetings and conferences mean that you need to fill the gap with more written communications and content. But you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time. Part of communications planning involves figuring out how to put multiple different spins on a single topic. Rather than writing new content each time, you can instead rewrite the content you have in a variety of different forms to reach specific audiences. Your core information remains the same, but now more than ever you need to tailor it in ways that speak directly to the audience you have in mind at any given time.

• DO Invest More in Digital Marketing.

Most marketing departments already devote much of their efforts to digital marketing, but companies need to invest in it more. Yes, in-person meetings and marketing efforts will always be valuable for building business. As COVID-19 has shown us, though, it won’t always be an option. Your company must be fully invested in alternative marketing strategies if you want to stay afloat during crisis times.

• DO Explore New Avenues of Marketing.

As technology has expanded, so have the potential avenues for marketing your business. Social media may have once been little more than a tool for distraction, but today it is a legitimate marketing forum for many businesses and an easy way to reach a wide audience. You should also be leveraging your existing partnerships to pursue shared marketing initiatives, as well as looking for new ways to reach out to and collaborate with the industry organizations whose canceled events you were hoping to sponsor or attend.

• DON’T Expect Everything to Go Back to Normal Right Away.

One of the most unsettling aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic is that no one can predict how long it will last. While we all hope it will end quickly, we should be prepared for it to last longer than we’d like. Your new marketing strategies need to be long-term plans that will continue to serve your business in the future, not just band-aids to get through the current crisis.

COVID-19 may feel like uncharted territory, but it’s not the first-time business has been disrupted around the world. It also won’t be the last. It might be a long time before we’re back to normal, and that normal may not look exactly like what we’ve been used to. Taking time to rethink your marketing strategies today will allow your marketing efforts to thrive through whatever crises may arise in the future.

Author Bio: Amy Juers is the founder and CEO of Edge Legal Marketing. Through her strategic approach and visionary leadership, Edge has become and remains the largest and most influential agency in the legal industry. With 23 years of marketing experience and global practice, Amy offers a consultative voice that drives her team and clients to the next level. Amy volunteers for Women in eDiscovery, serves as an ILTA Partner Advisory Council member, is an EDRM Global Advisory Council member and girls hockey board member.