What You Need to Include In Your Communications Plan
What a wild couple of weeks it has been surrounding the coronavirus. Businesses of all sizes have been drastically affected the outbreak. Some have been forced to close. Some have been forced to send their staff home to work remotely. Some have experienced significant declines in sales, while others have had customers storm their stores only to leave them with empty shelves. As we watched things unfold over the last few weeks, to say it’s been an interesting time to be in marketing and communications is an understatement.
We work with all kinds of companies, so we’ve seen some cases of how this is impacting our local communities and businesses. We’ve had IT companies being swamped with requests to help businesses set their staff up with the ability to work remotely. We’ve had travel agents scrambling to publish messages about the ever-changing travel restrictions and vacation cancelations. We’ve had several clients who depend on annual tradeshows for lead generations to be devastated when hearing the shows are canceled. We’ve also had clients in the service industry who are not particularly affected by the chaos that has occurred.
We have helped our clients to think through how they should address their stance on the outbreak with their own staff and customers. Situations like the coronavirus outbreak is a perfect example of disaster planning and communications that most business owners don’t think about in advance. Primarily because we haven’t really faced something like this before (at least within recent years).
One thing we know for sure is that it is incredibly important for you and your marketing team to know what to communicate and when to communicate it – both internally with your staff, with your customers and with the public. Creating a general guideline of how your company is going to address things like this helps tremendously. When you are faced with a crisis, you don’t want to be shooting from the hip and scrambling with last-minute messages – regardless if it is an outbreak like coronavirus, a social issue, or a national security event like 9-11. Here are our recommendations on what to think through and plan for from a communications standpoint:
Determine Who Takes Point
It doesn’t matter how big your company is or whether you have a marketing team – you need to know who is taking point for communications. Ideally, this decision would include the CEO, leadership team and a communications person. It is important to have all these members on the same page, but you’ll need one person to craft the message and one person who approves or proofs the message. This will help cut back on confusion amid the chaos of who is authorizing what messages.
Bottom Line: Know which individuals or companies need to be involved in your communications planning.
Determine What Issues Your Company Responds To
It is important to know what kinds of situations your company responds to, both internally, with the public and customers. Our nation faces crises all the time, and you can’t realistically respond to every single one. But what draws the line? Do you respond to situations like the Flint Water Crisis? Do you lower your flag at half-staff for every service member's death? Do you respond to political situations? Something to think about is how responding –or not responding – to the situation aligns with your core values and how it looks socially. It’s also important to consider your customers and their concerns about the situation. Does the situation impact your customers’ ability to communicate or do business with you? Does responding to the situation reassure your customers? Does not responding cause more concern for your customers?
Some of our clients have drawn a hard line at not responding to political or social issues. But in the case of the coronavirus, they’ve made an exception to publish a message to their customers on social media but are also not feeding into the hype.
Bottom Line: Create a list of example situations that warrant a response from your company, both internally and with customers.
Determine Who Delivers and Approves the Messages
Once you determine who is taking point, which situations warrant a response, and when/how your staff should respond, the next step is to determine who within the company approves the message and who delivers it.
Depending on your process and how big your company is, you might be the one to tackle both. Regardless, it is good to have an extra set of eyes on the message. So, if you are the business owner, you might be the one to craft your company stance but have your office administrator proof the message. If you are a marketing manager, you might craft the message and have the business owner approve it. Some details we recommend you think through:
What variations of the message do we need? This could include one official message to the staff, one to customers via email/call, and one to publish on the company’s website and social channels.
Who is responsible for crafting each message?
Who is responsible for approving the message?
Who should email messages and phone calls come from? The business owner? General manager? Marketing manager?
Bottom Line: You and your team need to know who is responsible for what communications and who has the authority to approve official statements on behalf of the company.
Determine What Your Staff Needs to Know
If you chose to address a public or national situation or not, you will likely get questions and concerns from your staff about what and how they should respond if they are asked questions from customers. Even if you choose not to make a public statement, you need to train your staff on what and how to respond.
As a business owner, you could be thinking that the coronavirus is just a bunch of bolognas and are more concerned about the hit your business could take vs actually contracting the virus. You might just want to ignore the hype and desire to continue business as usual. Which is perfectly fine! Meanwhile, your staff could be personally concerned and be constantly asked questions about what the company is doing about it by customers. Since your staff will likely have more contact with your customers than you (the business owner) will, it is important to coach your staff on how to respond. Even if that means having them say “it’s business as usual!”.
By not coaching your staff on how to respond, you could create a cluster of confusion, misrepresentation and inaccurate information for your customers.
Bottom line: Keep your staff informed frequently and provide scripted responses to common questions they may receive.
Determine What to Include in the Message
When crafting the message to the staff, it is important to be a light in the dark, stressful times. Everyone reacts differently to situations like coronavirus. Some could care less, while for others it could cause great concern and anxiety. It is important as leaders to remain calm and be of encouragement – even if you are personally stressed beyond belief!
For the staff, we recommend including:
Summary of the company’s stance
What the company is doing about the situation
Updates or any changes to policies/procedures
How the situation affects their daily job
What accommodations the company is making for staff
When and how staff should respond to customer questions about the situation
For customers and the public, we recommend including the following:
The company’s stance on the situation
What the company is doing about the situation
If there are any changes to business hours
If there are any changes to how customers can contact the company
If there are any changes to customer projects or orders that are already in the process
If there are any adjustments to cancelation policies
Bottom Line: Be as transparent as you can with your staff and customers and think through how the situation directly affects how they interact with your company
Determine When and How Often Updates Need to be Made
Depending on the type of situation, you may or may not need to provide your staff and customers with updates. With the COVID-19 outbreak, there have been a series of government updates and restrictions that developed daily (sometimes even by the hour). If your business was affected by the continuous updates from the government, then it might warrant an updated message to your staff and customers.
Our only recommendation is to make sure you aren’t jumping the gun. Make sure that you aren’t bombarding with your staff and customers with unnecessary communication updates. A great way to help filter these updates is to get together with your team, determine what the update is, when it needs to go out, and why it needs to be sent in the first place.
Bottom line: Monitor the situation frequently and update your messaging as needed.
We can’t predict all the possible situations that can arise, but we can be relatively prepared for how we respond to them. Big crises like coronavirus or smaller situations like power outages - your company should know how to respond. Need help building out your communications and response plan? We can help with that!