WELCOME TO
If anyone had told me in January
that 2020 was going to be utter and
complete chaos, I would have told
them they were crazy. Period.
At Tulip Media Group, we were coming
into 2020 with a lot of enthusiasm
and early success with our new digital
marketing programs. We were extremely
optimistic that this year was going to be
a spectacular year for the company and
everyone internally. No one would have ever
predicted what was just around the corner.
When I first heard about COVID-19, like
many others, I dismissed the idea. I thought
many people in the world were overreacting.
My family and I took a vacation down south
to get some sun the first week of March.
At that time, the COVID conversation
was a small one about a virus that was
happening far away from us in East Asia.
It never occurred to me that it might hit
North America in the way that it did.
I remember having conversations while
I was away where I openly voiced my
opinion that it really wasn’t going to be
that bad. However, the day after I got
back, nothing could have been farther
from the truth. That’s when our local
government started to go into lockdown.
Schools were canceled. People who had
been traveling that arrived home a day
after us were being forced to quarantine
for 14 days. It seemed like the whole
world was coming to an end. It was
really uncertain and uncharted times.
We were so fortunate to quickly make
the move into our home offices without
skipping a beat. Everything that we do
was already online in the cloud. However,
as I wrote about in the previous issue,
we did not come out of this unscathed.
We lost about 20 percent of our Client-
Partners in the first week of the lockdown.
Within the first three weeks, that
number grew to around 32 percent.
We are now in a place to look back and
have a clearer view of the entire situation
in hindsight. Like so many others, our
company pivoted very early on. The result
of this pivot was to put our SMarketing
program at the forefront of our marketing
strategy with slightly revised messaging.
This became critical for many Client-
Partners because trade shows and
conferences were being canceled through
the end of the year. Even face-to-face
meetings were being heavily restricted.
This meant that many of our Client-
Partners were looking for new ways to reach
potential customers. Our digital marketing
program went from a potential strategy to
the only opportunity they had to reach new
customers. The importance and value that
our programs were able to produce for our
Client-Partners became not just a good-tohave
and smart strategy, but a critical one.
Coming out of this crisis, it’s been
fascinating to view from our vantage point
how reliant Client-Partners have become
on online marketing where, previously,
it was just a part of their marketing mix.
SMarketing has become an essential
component of their survival and growth.
For many of the Client-Partners we started
working with in this pandemic, SMarketing
has played an integral role in their survival.
For us, this has been a huge motivator and
given us immense purpose in what we do.
I am so grateful to be in a position where
we are able to help these Client-Partners at
such a critical time in such a critical way.
Empowering companies to do this has
become a mission of ours. It has really
enhanced and transformed our culture
internally. Because our role has become
exponentially more significant to our
Client-Partners, what we do has been
imbued with a whole new level of meaning
and importance. To me, that’s been the
biggest satisfaction: knowing that we
are making a difference in all this.
Good luck.
Andy Buyting
Founder & CEO
[email protected]
TULIPMEDIAGROUP.COM | 3