Financial crisis is in everyone's lips these days. Shrinking budgets and lay-offs sprout everywhere. In such times is when your company must invest strongly in communication, whether it is in fact affected by the downturn or not. It's imperative to send out the right message to internal and external stakeholders.
I've been reading this remarkable article from Paul A. Argenti in Financial Times: "How to talk your way through a downturn". I think is very interesting to read and follow it's conclusions. Even in small companies.
Unlike during good times, you have an impatient audience expecting corporate messages. Employees, providers, customers... everyone is anxious to know about your company. Beware of being guilty by association: although your company is in good shape, if you don't communicate in the right way people could think you're in trouble just because the rest of the market is.
Argenti gives a lot of good advice:
• Do not hide
• Gather relevant information and stick to your story
• Communicate early and often
• Centralise communications
• Get inside the media’s head
• Choose communication channels thoughtfully
• Communicate directly with affected constituencies
• Keep the business running
• Keep values and character centre-stage
You can get into detail if you read the full article.
I think that e-mail is a good tool to use for this kind of communication too. The tracking information that you can obtain will be of good value, and you can adapt new messages to the results of the previous ones.
And don't forget that opted-in, planned, and well designed e-mail campaigns are one of your best allies to selling more and staying ahead of your competitors. When crisis strikes, the first reaction is to trim your marketing budget, when you should do the opposite. If customers are buying less you should do more marketing to overcome that tendency. If your competitors are trimming their investment in marketing to cut cost, you should increase it to be more relevant and take a definitive advantage.
Summing up: crisis times are times to invest more in communication in order to give the right messages to everyone and try to sell more. e-mail is your best friend for this.