This week’s 60 Minutes ended with a brief, poetic essay on the approaching solstice — Tuesday, December 21st — the turning point when days in the Northern hemisphere begin to get longer. The notion of the solstice has been especially meaningful in a year when businesses of all kinds were forced to reach their own turning points. We helped so many of them find their way during a time when it was critical to pivot by dramatically increasing their digital presences that we changed our company name to Solstice Digital Agency.
The urgency of the familiar 60 Minutes stopwatch image ticking the seconds away always reminds me that hours have not always been uniform in length. In the early 14th century hours were longer in the summer and shorter in the winter. The day was divided into 12 equal “solar hours” of different lengths as the amount of daylight increased or decreased — a minute-by-minute recognition of the solstice. It took the invention of the mechanical clock to change this.
In nature, in business, in technology, everything is always changing — even in the most ordinary circumstances. We’ve all just been through a time of extraordinary circumstances that is not yet over. The only way to adapt to change is to change yourself. In a time of extraordinary circumstances, changing your business becomes critical. The most significant business change accelerated by the pandemic is the promotion and delivery of services online.
It’s not only the clock that has changed through the millennia, but also the calendar. The uniformity on which the business world depends was not always there. In the mid-thirteenth century it was possible to leave one European city in a certain year, and travel to another where citizens were living in the previous year. While the official calendar did not change, the pandemic scrambled our perceptions of time; it became apparent that many businesses were living in different digital years than the target audiences they were trying to reach. Those who updated their offerings rapidly and intelligently turned a time of crisis into a time of opportunity.
Take one of our representative clients – a family-owned office furniture and design company in NYC, one of the hardest-hit cities in 2020. D2 Office Furniture & Design has a history that goes back four generations and more than a century.
Ask Hugh Schwartzberg, 4th generation co-owner of D2: “Solstice Digital acted as our marketing counsel and helped us pivot as our clients’ (and prospects’) offices closed and more people set up home offices than at any time in human history. I would call what they gave us a pandemic pivot digital marketing strategy which began with Solstice Digital’s immediate and intense focus on our website in March of 2020. It gave us a renewed marketing approach that put us back on the map.”
Solstice used the renewed strategy as the basis of numerous digital communications, including email, social media, and most importantly, Google Ads campaigns that targeted their audience during a time when the concept of selling office furniture in an NYC showroom seemed like a business model that would never recover. D2 soon experienced pre-pandemic numbers.
Reach your solstice moment like D2 Office Furniture & Design did this year, contact Solstice Digital Agency – a strategic digital marketing company so we can plan together how you can succeed in the new modern world. They reached their turning point with Solstice as their digital partner and in 2022, you can too.
In Part 2 of this article, we will dive further into the different digital process calendars that matter to us,including our onboarding approach, our digital assessment of where you are and where you can be, different calendars for different industries, and where your turning point might be. Stay tuned, and contact us today if you just can’t wait to learn more!