Thought Leadership: Creativity in Quarantine

The data and charts that are currently getting most airtime concern infection rates and mortality rates. But beyond the lives that are tragically being affected, how are businesses and humans reacting when it comes to protecting and nurturing their livelihoods, and how are they planning for a post-COVID-19 comeback? We decided to decode some of the poll data from some of our recent global webinars with entrepreneurs and corporates to find out. Here is what we found...

1. Will we be going back to Business-As-Usual? 

In some ways it is heartening to see that business leaders are realising that we will not be going back to a pre-Corona status quo. 89.2% don't think we are going back to the 'old normal'. This has huge implications for the future of business models, sales and marketing strategies, supply chains, and the future of work. More importantly, we need to create and imagine what the 'new normal' could look like. As the saying goes, perhaps the best way to predict the future is to create it?

2. Digital Disruption was the dress rehearsal. Corona is the burning platform for change. 

Only 15.4% of business leaders said they are not making changes today that they had been procrastinating on Pre-COVID-19. In other words, Corona has lit a fire under our backsides and we are making changes we know that we should have perhaps made earlier. 32.1% of our voters even got out ahead of the curve and made precautionary moves, with a further 52.5% saying they are making changes today that they had previously procrastinated on. So, we wonder, what are those specific changes, and what did the doomsday preppers know that the rest of us didn't? 

3. Thought Leadership Smarketing (Sales & Marketing) on the Rise

There is creativity in quarantine. We may be prevented from our old, analogue ways of selling and marketing our ideas, products and services, but it seems that business leaders and entrepreneurs are doubling down on digital content. Thought Leadership marketing, Social Media, Video Content, and Social Selling eg. Linkedin took out the top positions in terms of where these businesses will be investing. In a world of noise, creating digital signal is clearly more important than ever. 

4. Doing more with less

While we seem to be doubling down on digital, as humans we are also becoming more frugal, and trying to preserve cash - perhaps so we can slow down now, with a view to accelerating out of the curve? 74.3% of our attendee voters on 25 March, 2020 said they had already made budget changes since the severity of COVID-19 became apparent. It seems a lot of those budget cuts (re-allocations) are moving from the analogue world to the digital world. Necessity is the mother of invention / innovation, and we are being forced to be creative in quarantine. As humans we actually respond well to pressures, and we will find hacks and new combinations to help re-position our brands.  

We have recently been collaborating with brands like Facebook, Microsoft, Zurich, and Visa (etc) on creating digital signal in the noise. You may want to download a quick case study overview to see what some of our clients are doing to digitise their thought leadership to help spur some ideas for your own thought leadership and smarketing strategies (and yes we can help you with this - even virtually). 

5. Creative Hacks to connect with clients

While some of our webinar attendees are choosing to see the Corona lockdown as a creativity sabbatical, others are leaning in on Zoom webinars and video as key ways to connect with clients in an era of quarantines, while some are purely focussed on cash preservation (hibernation) as the way forward. Our experience of having run webinars for years is extremely positive. They build trust and engagement, force you to create salient content, and are 'Corona-free'. Webinars help spread ideas, not germs. They can also be a great lead generator and are eminently scaleable, and clearly they enable you to be more data-driven in your customer-centricity, and the anonymised data can even be turned into content like this blog.

Yes, we are doing our best to walk the talk. To check out our Smarketing Webinar on-demand video recording, click below.