The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed all our lives and everything we were used to. It has resulted in a massive difference in our daily functioning and enforced a ‘new normal’ for us to adapt to. Startups have been hit quite severely, leading to worries about building and sustaining brand stickiness. During this time, communications for startups is crucial in order to engage with audience and offer solutions as it’s a medium through which startups can educate, engage, and build brand trust.

Here are useful things that will help convince stakeholders to stay through the pandemic:

Accentuating the brand purpose
During the pandemic, there is a greater emphasis on ‘doing’ rather than ‘saying’. It has been a time for brands to revaluate their purpose and then articulate it as per their business objective, strategy of the company and, most importantly, how they are best suited to solve a problem in this period. This is to ensure that stakeholders are comfortable and trust in the brand is reinforced.

Understand customers’ behavioural and consumption patterns
Consumers are spending most of their waking time online. Many of their behavioural patterns have also changed—more emphasis on safety, the need to connect and many more such habits. Therefore, it’s important for brands to work with strong data & analytics and combine that with human intelligence to better understand the changing patterns of its audience. Doing so will direct them to platforms and channels where consumers are engaging the most. Assessing the target group, its sentiments, how and where they are spending their time, is all part of the process of understanding customers behavioural and consumption patterns.

Stay updated with industry trends and dynamics
Know-how about the industry dynamics and its trends at regular intervals will help start-ups to stay ahead of the curve. This includes leveraging local networks and conducting research among others. Staying up to date with current and new trends establishes brand recall among customers and in turn brand trust.

At the heart of it all lies the need to ideate and innovate regularly to keep up with the changing trends and consumer needs—and start-ups, being agile by nature, are best suited for it. There always lies an opportunity to engage with consumers beyond regular methods and be creative. Start-ups should connect with their stakeholders, be it at the company level or industry level during this time to ensure trust, loyalty, and appeal is not affected.