The Coronavirus has meant businesses have had to adapt their way of working to be more innovative and work smarter. When it comes to innovation, marketing during the Coronavirus should not be left as a last thought. Any short-term changes to your marketing could have a long-term impact, and this is something you should consider when reviewing budgets.
Marketing is all about creating brand awareness and increasing sales. Now is the time to look at your marketing and see what areas you can grow to bring in more revenue for now and when people return to work. Especially if your competitors are reducing their marketing, now is the time to look at your strategy as there’s less competition and the opportunity to come out on top once business resumes for all.
Marketing during the Coronavirus
If you haven’t already, you need to let your customers know that you are still open for business. This can be done via Google My Business or by creating a pop-up on your website and posting an update on your social media channels. The messaging and language you use is very important, and you will need to be empathetic and sensitive to your customers.
You can then build a marketing campaign, this campaign should include a communications strategy, and what you can do to improve your marketing during the Coronavirus to engage with your customers and retain them while they review budgets.
Conduct Market Research
You should use this time to listen to your customers and your employees and see what it is you can do to help them. Running market research will help you to understand what you are missing and where you can level up your marketing during the Coronavirus. Even offering some lighter services or advice for free to help other businesses will help increase your conversions in the long term.
You can use tools like Survey Monkey or Google Forms to create custom surveys for feedback from your customers, giving a better understanding of how you can tailor your marketing campaign to help solve their problems with your services. Or even help with advising you if you need to adapt your existing services. Other tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help indicate what your customers are searching for and where you should leverage any existing content to boost your organic traffic.
Engage and Retain your customer base
Based on the results from your research, you can create your communications plan with relevant and useful content to help raise your brand awareness. It’s important to stay in communication with your existing client base during the lockdown as you don’t want it to be a situation of “out of sight, out of mind”. There are various ways you can stay in contact with your customers. Here are some examples below:
Implement effective Email marketing
Especially at this time when people are at home and regularly online with time to read information, Email marketing is a great way to directly message those on your database who will benefit from your services.
The key to a successful email marketing campaign is targeting the right people with relevant and simple messaging, quality over quantity is the best way to look at this. To track and analyse these emails, you will need to use an email marketing tool, such as Pure360, DotDigital or Campaign Monitor. These tools also can be automated, the customer will receive tailored content at a specific time depending on where what stage they’re at on their customer journey.
Utilise Social media
Social media is another great way to communicate and engage with your followers. If you have a decent following on your social platforms, now is the time to utilise it and share your campaign and engage with them.
These platforms allow you to have a two-way conversation with your followers and feed them current and instant information. Even if it is more about engaging and growing your following rather than selling at the moment, it is a good time to get those communication lines moving.
There are many things that you can do yourself internally to engage on social media, or if you are looking for a more sophisticated campaign, eye-catching artwork or simply don’t have the time then outsourcing to experts in the field may be necessary.
Create Valuable Content
Updating your website with regular and valuable content such as blog posts and guides will help get any additional messages out to your audience. Offering good advisory content or providing useful information and statistics that help to keep your customers up-to-date and in the know will help to position your business as experts in the field. By creating unique and detailed information that helps to guide your customers and prospects in relevant subjects you are more likely to be found in search, have visitors return to your site for more content and have your content shared with others.
Regularly updating content also helps optimise your website for SEO purposes and good keyword targeting ensures that Google understands your business intent. Not only this, but a website that is showing to update content regularly is viewed and rated more positively by google when it comes to ranking in search. Producing regular content also allows you to communicate to visitors on any Coronavirus or general business updates.
Optimise your content for search
To improve your marketing during the Coronavirus, you should consider using this time to optimise your website for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO isn’t always an instant win for everyone, so it’s better to think of it as a long-term investment approach which over time will positively improve your rankings.
If you start now, when businesses start reopening and the employees who have been furloughed return to work, your SEO efforts will start to show return and continue to improve.
As a result, when people search for popular keyword terms in your industry, your business will be higher up the rankings, meaning you’ll get more traffic to your website and therefore more leads/sales.
You can start by looking at your competitors and reviewing the keywords they are using and consider if it makes sense for you to start targeting similar terms for your business. This can be done by ensuring such terms are used on your site with dedicated pages to concentrate on the most popular search terms.
If you are looking for a more thorough approach which ensures you are meeting all of the recommended methods of improving your rankings on Google, then you can employ a specialist SEO Agency to cover all angles and possibly even combine the strategy with a quick win PPC approach to help finance the longer-term SEO or media investment.
Get some quick wins with Paid Search
If you are looking for next day results and limited upfront costs, then Paid Search (PPC) with optimised landing pages which are structured perfectly for increased conversion rates are recommended.
Here you pay per click on your Google adverts which can be set up either yourself to test and learn from or via a Google certified partner agency who can ensure your ads perform cost effectively with maximised lead conversions.
Improve the Customer Experience
A well-considered customer experience and user journey on site should not be underestimated. Invest in your website now to ensure you are giving a fast, reliable and personalised experience to your website visitors.
Many different elements may be impacting your customer experience and therefore your conversion rates, such as messaging, layout, broken links and over complicated forms or bad terminology. By simplifying the process and implementing tried and tested methods of improving conversions you will make it easier for your customers to contact your business and increase leads.
And finally… don’t forget to measure your efforts
It’s important to measure your marketing during the Coronavirus, as this will help show ROI and where you should invest your budget. You should use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure the success of your campaigns and where your traffic is coming from, so you know what campaigns are working and if they need adjustments. You can measure leads, sales and referrals by setting up goals in your Google Analytics account.
Measuring your social media posts is also important, most platforms allow you to measure the success of your posts by reporting on clicks, views and engagement. This helps you to understand which posts are getting the most engagement and where you should focus your future content.
If you need any advice or are looking for an experienced digital marketing agency who can help you hit the floor running then get in touch. We are open for business and our expert team are available to discuss any marketing issues or strategies to help your business come out stronger following this pandemic.
Call us on 01489 854 716 or email [email protected]