when everything goes digital...you pivot

From In-Person Sales & Training To Online Everything
When COVID-19 hit, ARGUS's aviation centered business took an immediate hit.  Without the ability to physically audit airlines, physically teach courses, and physically meet with sales prospects no one knew what to do.  Not only could we not go to our customers, our customer's weren't even in the office checking emails and using our products.  The question was how do we reach our customers in a completely different way than ever before.  The answer was take it back to the digital drawing board.  
What do you do when the world changes overnight?  You pivot to a 100% digital sales platform.  

the three main objectives

back to start

be the expert

FOLLOW THE DATA

BACK TO THE START

When things change as quickly as COVID changed the world everyone ends up scrambling.  As a marketing expert, we were asking the questions: Where are our customers?  What do they need now?  How can will they interact with us when they aren't leaving their homes?  How can we add the value they need now?  What are our customer's NEW challenges?

While the basic buyer personas stayed the same, there were some serious questions to be answered within those descriptions.  

PART 1 - ANSWER THE QUESTIONS

Our marketing department took it all the way back to the beginning and really considered the questions I outlined earlier.  We really focused in on the new challenges our customers were facing almost over night and how to communicate to them that we had the answers they needed.


PART 2 - covid information & digital COMMUNICATION

Our marketing plan that just a month ago included trade shows, customer visits, audits, print mailers, round table discussions and more were reworked into a completely digital approach.

As a team we scoured our recent analytics to see what website pages our customers were looking for and reached out through our sales team to get clear answers to their daily struggles.  What we found wasn't surprising.  Most aviation companies needed someone who could sort through the data and give them a straight answer as to what the future looked like.  

We became that expert.

BE THE EXPERT

communicating in a way everyone can understand

The first challenge to becoming an expert in a field ruled by numbers is finding the right person to explain the information.  Our company was so blessed to find a new VP of Market Intelligence that was just as personable as he was brilliant when it comes to the aviation market.  Travis really took on the role of the face of ARGUS COVID Information.  

EASY TO FIND INFORMATION

When everyone's life get's hard, it's important to make some things easy.  We designed a page dedicated to the latest COVID information.  We included graphs of what was happening now, had links to vlogs and blogs where our expert was interviewed, Had registrations for webinars happening monthly that talked about how the industry was faring and included some predictions of the future.  We also included downloadable whitepapers and blog posts for people who preferred to read the information.

GETTING THE WORD OUT

Now that we had a central page for information, our focus turned to communication. 

Email campaigns were carefully planned out to avoid overloading out customers while still engaging them.  We analyzed subject lines, buttons and content placement to ensure the highest open and click through rates

There was a focus on SEO for the page and social media posts, press releases, and online advertising led people from our social networking sites back to the COVID page for the information they were looking for.  

Within a month, our website metrics were back on track and rising higher than they ever had before.  Our monthly sales qualified leads had doubled. And our COVID page had reached the first position in google.  Needless to say, as a marketing team, we were thrilled

FOLLOW THE DATA

STAYING THE COURSE

If your strategy is working, why reinvent the wheel?  With the length of the pandemic lasting longer than anyone expected, our next challenge was to convince our product teams to stay the digital course.  The results of our COVID Expert Campaign were shared with the other departments within the company.  Discussions were had about how to use this strategy to re-engage our customers with our SaaS products and audit services.  

IT'S HARD TO ARGUE WITH NUMBERS

Strategy meetings were set up where we shared the success of our COVID Expert Campaign.  After seeing the success it was hard to argue with numbers.  Brainstorming sessions were set up with each department with a focus on what comes next for our customers.  How will our flight operation customers get back on their feet after a drop close to the crash of the early 2000's.  

New marketing plans have been created for each of our audience profiles in an attempt to educate and facilitate them upon their return to normalcy.  The campaigns mirror parts of what we have already done and have begun to bring in results that can be seen in our metrics and our financial reports.  
"In addition to having strong digital marketing knowledge, Michelle has an innate ability to take abstract concepts and relay them visually, which proved invaluable in our organization. Michelle also is very proactive in evaluating environments she is in and developing a strategies to improve the effectiveness of the marketing department. Thanks for Everything Michelle! "
Charles Cunningham, VP Marketing & Sales @ ARGUS International Inc.

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©2020 Michelle Passey