Marketing During a Pandemic

The following post was written by Eruptr’s own Joel Cessna, Vice President of Sales.

The past few months have been a learning experience for all of us. What will make us great is if we learn from this experience and move forward, being more prepared should there be a Phase 2 as experts are predicting. I wanted to put down what we have seen with our client base, as well as health systems across the system, and share how we are seeing slow re-emergence into the community.

First, we need to start with March. This is when we all were in reactionary mode, and making quick (sometimes rash) decisions. What we saw was about 40% of our clients pause all campaigns, including SEM. In hindsight, pausing SEM campaigns likely was not the best move for a couple of reasons:

• People continued to search for your services
• Competition continued to market their services (however those that did keep campaigns running had greater market share or in some cases all market share)
• Potential campaign optimizations lost by turning campaigns off

So what can we learn from March? In most cases, you still will want to maintain some SEM in your market. A better approach would be to scale budgets and revamp the verbiage in your SEM ad, but continue to maintain a presence. 

Then we moved into April, where health systems started to get a better understanding of what they were dealing with and started to strategically plan for what is next. Here we saw a huge influx of Telehealth programs being launched and being promoted primarily through SEM and Social. I would expect these platforms to stay as part of the care health systems offer; however, how actively they are promoted and accessible will depend on reimbursement. Of course, there will be both opportunities and challenges faced with this platform, but one example of how hospitals are figuring out how to adapt to their community needs.

Now we are in May. Towards the end of April and early May, many of our clients have launched a branding campaign around messaging such as “We are Safe” or “We are Open” while outlining new practices implemented to maintain safety and cleanliness for patients. These are mostly being promoted via Social and Display advertising, linking to a landing page that outlines the steps hospitals are taking and what patients can expect when they show up. One recommendation we have here is more direct copy in creative as well as imagery reflecting the new normal. Now is not the time to beat around the bush but rather be direct and meet consumers where they are in their journey

The other exciting area we are seeing in May is elective surgeries opening up. This has started most of our clients that paused SEM campaigns back in March to start to consider turning campaigns back on. The question I get asked often is “Do I just turn them back on like they were running before?”. The answer to that would be likely not. There are two important items to consider when turning your campaigns back on:

• Have your service line priorities changed? Is there a significant backlog/capacity issue to be aware of?
• Do we need to change the verbiage of your ad messaging?

Once you have addressed these two questions, then it would be time to relaunch your campaigns.

We are continuing to learn each day and adjust to a new normal. Things continue to change, just not as rapidly as they were back in March. It is important to be flexible and have the ability to change your approach quickly, however making sure all ramifications are considered. Some were simply told by their CEO to stop all marketing. Should there be a Phase 2, we now have some lessons learned now to provide better data to leadership to help guide those decisions. 

But most importantly, it was great to see how we as an industry, vendors, and clients, came together to help each other out. The support, free assessments, expert podcasts, whitepapers, and other solutions to help each other in this time was truly amazing to see. It makes one proud to be part of this community.

The original version of this page was published at:  https://eruptr.com/marketing-during-a-pandemic/