Guiding Our Clients Through COVID-19 with Hayley Kinne

SocialMadeSimple’s Strategic Program Manager, Hayley Kinne, talks with Business Development Associate, Ryan Chiasson, about shifting social marketing strategies and guiding multi-location businesses through COVID-19.

Hayley: Two of the main things that I focused on was, one, if a client wanted to address COVID-19 and make sure that they were speaking out about it, we want to make sure that it is our responsibility to keep putting out content that we believe to be truthful, accurate, and from credible sources. So that was a standard across the SocialMadeSimple policy; where we were not going to be pushing out content that came from sort of nowhere. We felt that was our responsibility as a Facebook marketing partner to do so. So I worked with our clients on making sure that they were comfortable with the sources that we were sourcing, and what we were going to be pushing out, again, for the ones that wanted to post and advertise in the context of COVID. 

 

The second was making sure that for, you know, one of the fitness franchises that we do advertising for, which is one of our most successful clients, making sure that when we decided that we wanted to continue advertising, we were contextualizing the ads with what was going on. We weren’t just pretending like nothing was happening. We were speaking out about health concerns, the benefits of maintaining your strength and wellness and boosting your immunity in the context of fitness. Also building up what we consider to be a waiting list concept, so we identified the fact that there were closures, weren’t encouraging people to workout, but encouraging people to stay engaged with the brand. 

 

Those were, you know, very important things. So making sure that during all of this you were using our platform on behalf of our clients to ensure that information that was being put out was accurate and truthful. Then also making sure that the strategies that we were maintaining, addressed what was happening and made sure that it was appropriate and that we weren’t just saying, “Come in and work out! It doesn’t matter what’s going on, we’ll see you soon!”. Everything was kind of shaped around what was happening at the time and still is happening today.