Well aren’t you all lucky ducks! 🦆 🦆 🦆 This week, with the current calamity that is Covid-19, we’re bringing you two episodes of The 4 AM Report!
There's a lot of noise about what we should be doing. So we’re keeping our episodes short and sweet 🍭 🍭 🍭 - delivering lots of marketing and comms advice that you can use today!
Today? We talk strategy. When all this broke, we put the brakes on:
🦠 Immediately stopped everything we were doing for every client.
🦠 We paused the calendars and ALL automation.
🦠 And looked at our strategic process - rinsing through every step with this new COVID lens.
That strategy? We call it the five degrees of simplification – AKA “The Toddler Method” – and there’s a special “Toddler” workbook available you can download for free.
And when we say free, we mean free, like - free free - like not even your email required! 😂
This is something we’ve been talking about a lot with this pandemic – that businesses – where they can – should be un-gating any content that would help other business owners and entrepreneurs get through this chaos. So yes – we’re snorting our own blow.
Have a listen – and get ready to re-jig your strategy (if you haven’t already!).
Or, continue reading for a few quick tips!
The Toddler Method
“The Toddler Method (Five Degrees of Simplification) kind of has its origins in my little girl who is nine years old right now. But when she was a toddler, she helped me simplify most things by asking the question “Why?” a lot. A LOT. That's why they call it the terrible twos - they keep asking why it’s annoying! LOL And most parents, like make jokes about it or try to stem that. I think it comes from a deep need they have to understand “What is the simplest version of this message?” So, we decided to go with that. And we ask ourselves “why” a lot when we're trying to do anything, and we really think that has value in the moment, about defining that compelling reason why you need to continue to communicate amidst the noise WHILE making sure that your audience understands it.”
“The workbook is an 11-step strategic process. It takes you from start to finish and is a really, really good exercise to go through when you have the time. We're just going to pull out five parts of that to talk about just for the sake of timing, and we don't want to overwhelm you. The very first thing that we recommend - before you get into strategy even- is to a content audit. Everybody knows what a content audit is. Go through your library of content, things you've created, things you've produced, podcasts you've done, go through everything, and put anything that you feel is relevant and helpful to your audience right now in a little figurative box. And maybe those things need a little tweaking, maybe they're old, maybe you need to have a copywriter. Maybe write something up to make sure it's clear why this is relevant to the audience now during this time, but you know, you don't need to go and reinvent stuff, probably most of you have a lot of great, great content already produced, you just need a way of repurposing it a bit for these times.”
“You've been marketing to this 40 year old mother of three: you know what she does for work, you know what she does after work. You know what she likes to do with her friends, you know what her kids’ activities are, you know, you’ve planned that whole thing out. You still want to market to that 40 year old mother of three. But her life is turned upside down right now!! She's trying to do work at home. She's trying to keep the kids busy. She's trying to think of educational activities for them to do she's probably going a little bit insane. Are you going to be messaging to your audience the same way? I don't think so. We definitely aren't. So, you know, have some empathy here and think right now about your audience -because what they want might have changed a little bit right now.”
There’s much more in the podcast, including how to think about competitors, and why it’s so important to have your messaging ON POINT during these difficult times. We hope you enjoy!
Now get yourself over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe to us – you won't regret it!
Plus, if you're losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at C+P Digital.
And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
