Today’s blog is incredibly short and focused on one simple question.
What have you noticed about how we’re being communicated with since this began?
Got it?
Frequency. It’s happening regularly.
Putting, aside that the messaging is all over the place that frequency is very deliberate.
In times of crisis, the way we communicate becomes more important.
When people are scared, higher reasoning takes a backseat to more base motivations like fear, anger, frustration.
That’s one reason why, in times of stress, great communicators do certain things differently. They:
- Slow down the speed of information,
- Increase the clarity of the message,
- Acknowledge and name the issues,
- Outline the key information, directives or process to be followed
This can often mean the difference between panic and relative calm, which brings me the next question right here now.
How are you communicating with your clients right now?
I’m guessing like most of the businesses I spoke to, you’re on the phone a lot, answering queries – which is great and we’re already seeing the positive feedback on this all over the place.
This is what I know most of you do really well and you’ve been asking to be allowed to for a while now.
But I want to share one thing.
What if you could do it not just on a client by client basis, but en masse?
A little piece every day to your entire client base replicated your efforts across all those who are worried but not sharing it with you.
To me, this client communications piece is one of six key areas to focus on right now.
We know most businesses haven’t communicated with existing clients in a marketing sense regularly enough.
Now’s the time to change this.
You can put aside that fear that you’d be “bothering” them or filling their inbox.
Now is the time to on a regular basis, weekly, every couple of days, maybe even daily, share something short, sharp, clear…
- that helps them understand what’s going on.
- what they should pay attention to,
- what the long term game is and
- what are the things they can do right now in order to make their way through it
There are many opportunities popping up right now in an otherwise terrible situation but this one is one of the bigger ones.
