Ah, we continue to social distance.
The gap between our expectations and reality, as far as this COVID thing goes, is the requisite 2 meters, some might say.
In this time, one of the biggest changes I’ve made to how we do business is this:
(And yes we continue to do business. If you’re saying that’s not possible or has been cut way down, and you have transferable skills to the interwebs, you’re wrong 🙂 And you need to do this.)
Pick up the phone.
Here’s who I am. Someone who likes to hide behind my screen. There are very few things in my world that can’t be achieved from behind a screen.
But EVEN with that generally outlier view to life as a 40-something, I’m finding this shut down hard.
Nobody ever likes to be FORCED to do something.
And that suspension of life and liberty is a tempting little place of loss in which we react much like we do in times of grief. At the end of March, the Harvard Business Review published an eloquent piece titled “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief“.
In a creepily foreshadowing-ey move, 2 years ago, we at c+p digital came up with a change management model for communicating in times of (generalized) crisis.
In this moment, the name we gave that model, which we trademarked by the way, seems deeply tone deaf. (Its #FlipIt2TenX – named for it’s massive ability to convert 10 times as much as your current CTA conversions. Obscure. Weird. But fucking effective. Like a lot of what we do.)
But that’s not the point.
The point is while we probably will not use that name for a while, the model is this.
All change (and crisis) brings resistance.
Your mind likely reacts with fear because it perceives the change as a loss of life and liberty in its current form, in some way.
So it reacts like it does when it’s grieving.
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance!
That’s how we think all crisis (or change) communication works. And we put our time and actual dollars into developing that thinking.
Emotionally intelligent thinking.
Then a year ago, we started a podcast. A digital marketing firm that came to the party a decade too late, or so we thought. So we had to bring something special.
The something special was a hook.
We called it The 4 am Report, and we asked marketers and entrepreneurs, ‘what keeps you up at night?’ Dude, is that ever a loaded question right now.
And we’ve lived up to that emotionally intelligent responsibility as well.
Why?
A deep understanding of headspace.
That comes from years of mental health issues that were never understood.
From being dismissed, on multiple levels.
From knowing quite clearly what we didn’t want, even if we had no clear clue
what we did want.
When you start with the acceptance, emotionally intelligent communication gets very easy. (That’s what our change management framework was all about.)
And then demographics and psychographics start to MEAN something.
Here’s Will’s example. So you say your audience avatar is a 40 year old mom of 3. She’s obviously employed and had a particular kind of life up until very recently.
NOW that’s completely changed.
That same lady is homeschooling her 3 kids.
Failing on multiple deadlines.
Trying to cook and clean and second guess whether delivery is entirely safe.
And probably discovering she doesn’t like her partner very much as a person 😉
That’s a whole other person.
Does your marketing get that?
Probably not.
Figure out how to make it happen. Emotionally intelligent communication is all that matters in this moment.
