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The things we can do to stay sane and stay in business during this sort of crazy time today, I'm going to talk with you about a handful of marketing things that you can do right now that are pretty safe to do right now. But a couple of housekeeping things. First, there will be a webinar tomorrow, Thursday, what is the date? Tomorrow, March 20 26 at 11 a.m. Central Time. And it's part of my majesté webinar series, which we will now be doing free for everyone every single week.

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Tomorrow's session will be with jewelers mutual, several people from the jewelers mutual team and also with Sarah Yood from JVC. And we'll be talking about insurance and legal issues you need to be aware of. OK, so what are some marketing things that you can be doing right now? Because we're trying to think in five day increments and business can't stop entirely. So you need to market. But how do you do that? Well, in this moment. The first is that you can sell, but you need to sell with some caveats.

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So you need to be aware that tone and message are very important right now and also that the population at large is very much in conflict about should we shut down, shouldn't we shut down? And there are opinions on both ends of that spectrum and everywhere in between. And you need to make sure that you are not setting out a tone deaf message when you do this. So when you're selling, I wouldn't be doing a bunch of promote, promote, promote products right now.

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I don't think that's the best use of your marketing time or energy. And also, it risks making it look like we're in business as usual and everybody knows we're not in business as usual. And they they expect you to recognize that we're not business as usual. It's OK to say things like, look, we're here and we're available. If there's something you need, those kinds of messages are great. I would advise that you have some sort of a safety manifesto on your website or as a link that they can get to to see what you are doing, because there are a lot of landmines that you can step on when you're selling.

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Right now, for instance, we've had people's customers tell them, well, fine, you can ship it to me. Don't you care about those UPS and FedEx drivers? But how are you treating your employees? Are they safe? Is your bench jeweler safe? So people are thinking about a lot beyond just the jewelry delivery. So share what you are doing. If you have staff that's working with you, share what you're doing to protect them, share what you're doing to prevent the spread of infection yourself.

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How are you behaving so that you don't contribute to a problem, share how you leave things out for your delivery drivers instead of encountering them face to face, how you've arranged with them to pick up with having to interface with you directly for shipping jewelry. This gets challenging because there are signature requirements and things like that. But work with your shipper and with your insurance provider to know exactly what you can do to avoid contact and still be covered and then share that with your customers so that they know you are thinking about more than just earning money for yourself, because that's that sort of don't be selfish message is out there.

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And for the people who are paying attention to it, it can really affect their perception of you as a brand. So sell but sell with some caveats and a lot of communication about how you are selling as a responsible citizen. In today's moment. It's also really important to stay in your lane. If you're not a medical professional, then it's not a very safe thing to be talking about covid-19 as a in a marketing type of presentation. So if you are, you know, if you have decided to do a certain practice and share the link to the resource that you used for it, share where you got your information from, be transparent.

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Transparency is really important right now because information is changing constantly. So you can say this is the best information I have right now and this is where I got it from. And then that way you're staying in your lane. You're referring to professionals who have given you advice and it just it protects your brand and it protects you. And it's the right thing to do more video right now. You could be doing a lot of promotion on video, just like I'm doing now with this little twenty dollar camera and the microphone that's built into it.

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So it doesn't have to be a great production. You can see no one did hair and makeup here, but communicate with your community a lot more using. Or social media channels or using one to one meetings there. It's a great time for you to have conversations with your customer using Zoom or Vector or go to meeting. I've noticed Google Hangouts is really buggy at the moment. I think there are just way too many people using these free channels that the channels aren't accustomed to this much traffic.

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So I'm noticing that we're not getting great reception on our Google Hangouts channel. There are lots of affordable one to one and group meeting tools that you can be using and you can use those with your customers. So share video on social media. Do Facebook live if you want to do LinkedIn live. That's a great option also. But you have to sign up for it. You have to go to LinkedIn. And if you type in the search term for LinkedIn live, it'll show you the directions to a page where you can share what you're going to use LinkedIn live for because it's not automatic, like anybody can do Facebook live, but not everyone can do LinkedIn live and then put little videos up on your social channels talking about what you're working on and what your challenges are right now.

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And those are all really good ways to connect. But video is a powerful way to connect in this moment. Oh, if you are using social media schedulers to have, like, meet Edgar or HootSuite or any of those, if you've got content scheduled out, go look at your content. Q It may be time to clean up that queue or even suspend the Q or replace some of the information in the queue because messages that made sense, you know, even three weeks ago may not make sense today.

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They may be tone deaf today. So, you know, make sure that you take a look at that. Q If that's something you use, also make sure all of your messaging is in brand. Now, that is a very individual thing. Your brand is specific to your presentation. So if you're typically funny, be funny. If you're typically quirky, be yourself. If you're typically serious, be serious. If you have a tendency to be political and people know you for that, then don't stop being who you are.

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Just make sure you're in the brand that you've already established with your customer base. If you have been very careful not to share sort of a personal or personality with your community before and now you're starting to do video, your personality is going to come through. So make sure you think very carefully about who you are and how well your customer base already knows you so that you can stay in brand and not, you know, slip off into some messaging or some portrayals that actually won't work for your customer base.

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And finally, in your marketing efforts right now, this is a really great time to be about your community. We're all trying to think of ways that we can help or improve the current situation, make that part of your communications, share what you're doing. Like Lauren Harper, they're making masks and they're shipping off batches of them to places that need them. And that's part of her marketing, but it's also part of her brand and part of her personality.

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So as a designer, that really works. I've noticed that models find Glaucus is doing the same thing. They're deep into making masks because that seems to be where the greatest addressable need is at the moment. So find an addressable need and work on that just because it's the right thing to do. We all need to pitch in right now and then also share that information with your community so that they can participate with you if they want. They can share more ideas with you.

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If they want, they can just cheer you on if that's what they've got to offer. And it helps us build connections for later. So sell with caveats. Stay in your lane, watch your messaging. Don't be tone deaf. Be aware of the fact that there are lots of people out there who may view this whole experience differently than you do. Keep the messages within your brand. And if you haven't thought about what your personality is as it relates to your customers, hone in on that right now and try to do things that are community focused.

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And those will be very good marketing activities for right now. Remember, we're working in five day increments. So that's something you can do right now that will be meaningful. And again, please join us at the webinar tomorrow where we're going to be talking about your insurance requirements and some legal questions. And at work start world. You can also see the rest of the webinar series that we're about to offer. So that's it for the moment. Thanks bye.