Shifting Your Content Strategy During COVID-19

These are unprecedented and uncertain times. The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our everyday lives and business operations and is affecting people, communities and companies around the world.

Although nothing is business as usual right now, we’re all in this together.

Since all of our internal operations are evolving as rapidly as this pandemic, we’ve put together this list of actions our customers can take — broadly and within Stackla — to help take on this challenge and prepare for life after it.

Provide Trusted, Real-Time Information 

Amid the stress and uncertainty, it’s never been more critical to keep your employees and customers up-to-date with the most accurate information available.

Today’s noisy and fast-paced media environment makes it easy for misinformation to spread and difficult for people to quickly find valid answers to their pressing health and travel questions.

Something many DMOs have already started doing is providing accurate and up-to-date information on COVID-19 health news, travel and business restrictions from local government organizations and officials. In Australia, both the City of Sydney and the City of Adelaide have created centralized destinations for locals and travelers to look to for real-time information directly from the verified social accounts of local authorities.

Stay Connected While Social Distancing

Like most companies, Stackla’s global team has been working from home, washing our hands, not touching our faces and practicing social distancing when in public for essential outings. But even teams that are used to regular Zoom meetings and fast-paced environments are feeling the disruption, isolation and added anxiety of the current crisis. Now, more than ever, businesses need to stay connected to their employees and customers.

In times like these, little acts of digital connection can go a long way towards fostering a sense of community.

To help stay connected, you could:

• Share employee content of how people are working from home (e.g. photos of their home office set-ups, tips for staying productive with at-home distractions, etc.)
• Promote how your brand is supporting its community (e.g. discounts it’s offering, funds it’s created, organizations it’s donating too, etc.)
• Create a hashtag for any special efforts your brand has created or is supporting (and make sure to set up terms in Stackla to find and aggregate that content)

Review All Current and Upcoming Marketing Activities

In this moment of worldwide crisis, the last thing you want to do is come off as being insensitive or making light of a serious situation.

Review and pause all currently running or upcoming activities that could be seen as inappropriate or compassionless during this pandemic.

• Make sure your ads aren’t striking the wrong tone
• Pause promotional emails encouraging group gatherings or non-essential travel
• Update your scheduled social posts and rights request language to reflect your overall COVID-19 messaging

Keep Building Your Asset Library & Sharing Fresh Customer Content

Just because your marketing campaigns are on hold, doesn’t mean that your content library needs to stop growing.

In fact, aggregating and leveraging user-generated content (UGC) is a timely and cost-effective way to keep all your content channels fresh and trusted in tough times. As you know, people trust other people more than they trust brands, and they look to peers as sources of inspiration and hope when times are hard.

You can use this time to optimize your UGC content engine and share authentic customer and employee content with your audiences.

• Showcase your loyal customers, new ways people are using your products or how your employees are staying positive or giving back to people in need
• Revisit your search terms. Are they still relevant? Are there any content categories you might have overlooked in the past?
• Take time to delete unused content and train Co-Pilot on which content you don’t want
• Set-up Automation Rules to help streamline content workflows (you can even set rules to remove any content mentioning sensitive keywords like COVID-19)
• Research new social networks you could be aggregating content from

Prepare for the Future

Although we don’t know when this pandemic will end, there is no time like the present to start preparing to hit the ground running once the crisis is over.

Make the most of this time by reevaluating your current processes and priorities. Think about what your brand will focus on when the world is in recovery. Will the campaigns you have paused still be a priority in a post-pandemic world?

• Start prepping your social calendars for the months ahead
• Prepare sales, promos and campaigns for times of recovery and for when life starts feeling more normal
• Set-up search terms in Stackla for these upcoming campaigns

These may seem like small and trivial things to focus on while the world is in such turmoil, but we will get through this together. Taking daily actions, planning ahead and staying busy can help to reduce our anxieties, keep our spirits up and set us up for success in the future.

Together, we’ll make it through — one day at a time.