Not every branding, messaging, or product pivot has been the major breakthrough that companies needed to survive whatever difficulties they were suffering. Some of the reasons for the misstep could involve messaging that failed to connect with consumers, a product that failed to solve buyers’ pain points, or an inability to set their brand apart from others within the industry.

These scenarios are very real possibilities for any business during this time and may come to fruition without specific attention to various aspects of your business.

Refinement

You will, throughout the entire pivot process, need to continue refining your plans in order to achieve your desired results.

Your Audience

Have the changes in your business also changed your target audience? In almost every possible situataion, the answer is yes. Let’s examine some of our previous examples:

• The drum makers who pivoted to make personal protective equipment—their audience is no longer musicians and is now frontline healthcare workers.
• The fashion line that pivoted to manufacture hospital scrubs—they’re no longer speaking to the trendy, well-off women of the world.
• The breweries and distilleries now making disinfectant—their product, message, and audience is now vastly different.

Whatever your pivot—whether new products in a whole new market space or a change in the use of a product and in your brand messaging—you can be certain your target audience has also changed.

As you learn more about your new market space and your brand’s specific place in it, you must continue to refine your buyer personas to ensure you reach your buyers.

Your Messaging

As you refine your audience, you may discover that your messaging must also be refined. What once reached your target audience will now fall on uninterested ears. Even new taglines and social media posts created with the best of intentions could come across as tone deaf with your audience.

Your new messaging can’t be such a departure from your brand that buyers no longer recognize you. At the same time, that message must uphold and drive forward your current brand strategy. For instance, McDonald’s recently caused an uproar with their redesigned logo encouraging social distancing, while also still requiring employees to continue working through the pandemic with no additional healthcare benefits or hazard pay. That type of dissonance in your messaging is hard to overcome, especially if your brand isn’t as large as McDonald’s.

Acceleration

As you refine your audience and messaging, you’ll position your company to accelerate your growth during this economic downturn, and then straight into the new economy. Before you shift gears into overdrive, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

First, growth during the era of the coronavirus will not look like any growth you’ve previously experienced. In some industries, growth will be rapid—so rapid that keeping up might seem impossible. For a good example of this, consider Zoom. The video and web conferencing company had experienced plenty of success before most corporations shifted to a work-from-home productivity model. After the safer-at-home orders were introduced, however, it became the go-to for nearly every business that didn’t already have a virtual meeting solution in place.

With that growth came serious consequences—problems they’d never before needed to consider because they’d never before dealt with the sheer number of customers that had come on board. Refinement of security protocols were necessary to maintain their market position and continue their rapid acceleration. Without that refinement, users would have abandoned Zoom for other potential solutions, and growth would have slowed back down to a crawl.

For other industries, however, growth during the current environment may look nothing like the growth you’ve previously experienced because you’re starting again from the ground floor. This could be the case if you’ve developed a new product to meet emerging needs and have yet to gain proper exposure for that product. You may also become dissatisfied with your acceleration speeds if you’ve entered a new market space you’ve never before inhabited.

Rather than measure your success against the profits and exposure you received before the pandemic, think back to the early growth of your company. You may see numbers that mirror your first year of business rather than your most recent year of business. If that’s the case, don’t be discouraged.

You grew your company from the ground up once before—you can do it again.

We’re here to help, wherever you may be in your new journey. In addition to agency services, Marketing initiative Worx also provides Fractional CMO services to give you the benefit of C-suite knowledge and experience without the cost. To learn more, reach out at any time.