Marketing During COVID-19 – A New Outlook on Marketing
Your Old Plan is Not Useless, But it Must be Re-examined
If you have not already developed a new marketing plan due to COVID-19 then now is the time. All points of marketing have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and being sensitive to your customers and their budget is essential. There are several marketing tips to help maximize a budget and connect with customers. Here are a few that may assist with your marketing strategy.
While Marketing During COVID-19 – Share What Your Company is Doing to Handle the Pandemic
It is important that your customers know how you are managing your business during COVID-19. They need to know that you are available and are still providing the services or products they need to maintain their business. While businesses may not be functioning as usual, many are working remotely and are focusing more on their online communications. Let your customers know how to reach you and advise them of the services or products that may have changed due to the complications of the pandemic.
Stay Connected with Your Customers Online
It is important that your customers know how you are handling marketing during COVID-19 and to see how they are managing their businesses during the pandemic. Now is a great time to help your customer in ways you may have never have before. Now is a great time to support your customers by reaching out with resources that can help their marketing and sales. Staying connected online is of the upmost importance for businesses that have been closed during the pandemic. Check in with your customers frequently to answer any questions and help them navigate through the daily changes and challenges.
Incorporate Empathy in Your Marketing Communications
The key to communicating while you are marketing during COVID-19 is to make sure you are empathetic to your customer’s business situation and budget. Many business owners have to make tough choices and budgets are tighter than usual. While you are marketing during COVID-19 do your research and be as cost effective as possible to ensure that your customer’s budget is maximized. Put a plan in place that meets your customer’s expectations with ROI producing results. Additionally, ensure that all marketing messaging is empathetic to the current world circumstances. Understand your audience and research the problems that need to be resolved. Be the solution.
Refresh Online Content and Revisit Campaign Strategies
A new way of marketing has developed since COVID-19 arrived. Due to these circumstances, it is important to make sure your keywords and content are up to date with a current message, especially on the homepage or blog. Ensure your content provides a value to your customer; examples of this are resources for their business, ways to help them operate more efficiently, cost-saving products and services or tips to help grow or retain their customer base.
It is also a time to revisit a Pay Per Click (PPC) strategy. Generally the focus has changed during this time and budgets may be better spent on brand identity and value versus sales. Many business owners are tempted to stop or pause their campaigns, however, not getting in front of your customers may make them forget your brand. Out of sight is out of mind. Instead of pausing a campaign, consider a reduced budget with focus on brand identity and value to your customer.
Update Marketing Plans with Long-Term Goals in Mind
No one knew the world would shut down, and something like COVID 19 was not likely prepared for in a marketing plan. So, if your business has not developed a short or long-term COVID-19 marketing plan, then now is the time. No one knows how long COVID-19 is going to be around, so it is good idea to plan and organize what your business is going to do financially to survive it. Some of your original long-term marketing plans may remain, with some changes, and this, may be the main focus of your marketing during COVID-19. However, your plan on reaching those goals in the short term will likely change and should be revisited in your marketing plan.
Let Marketing Communication Tools Guide Sales Teams
There are many marketing tools such as marketing automation and customer relationship management systems that are beneficial while you are marketing through COVID 19. Use these tools to your advantage to help guide your sales team on your customers new behavior. You may discover customers who were normally behaving one way are working on a different marketing strategies that are making them behave differently now. Your marketing and sales teams should be aware of these new behaviors to know how to strategize your own marketing and sales plans.
Be Sensitive to Your Audience on Social Media
Social media is a great way to connect with your audience during COVID 19, but it is especially important to be aware of your message so it does not come off as insensitive. Social listening during these sensitive times allows you to be aware of what topics, hashtags and other engagement your audience is partaking in. Social listening helps you craft the right message, engage responsibly and post your message at the appropriate times. A 2020 social marketing strategy is necessary.
Marketing during COVID 19 is an ongoing process as everything continues to evolve. Being actively involved in communication with your customers, audience and staff is essential to developing the right strategy. At Strategic Marketing we can assist you with your marketing during COVID 19. You can reach us at 561 688-8155.
- Published in Strategic Marketing, Web Design
A Guide to Marketing Your Business After COVID-19
Your Old Plan is Not Useless, But it Must be Re-examined
Chances are, you had a marketing plan before COVID-19. If you didn’t, that’s okay too. Whether you’re needing to tweak your marketing strategy or create one entirely from scratch, the following Guide to Marketing After COVID-19 will assist you with key elements to consider when it’s time to start advertising your business again.
User Behavior Has Changed
The world you advertised in before does not exist anymore. People are not going to snap back into the exact same place before Coronavirus. We have been through a trauma and this will affect how we return to daily life. We will continue to go about our lives, but there will be a mindfulness that didn’t exist before and it will change how we behave. Take something as innocent as a birthday party. There will no longer be someone blowing on a cake just before it’s served. We will adapt, however, and continue the tradition. There will be a similar routine with the birthday song and cupcakes. Our lives will return but we will adapt to new circumstances. It’s these nuances that you’ll need to consider when developing your messaging and honing your new strategy.
The experience we have been through and the awareness we now have on how quickly germs can spread will create a deep-seated impact on our daily lives; therefore, every message you send and keyword you bid on must be rethought. During quarantine, we learned new behaviors either by choice or necessity and will bring these new behaviors with us into the new world. The boomer who was skeptical of online shopping is now getting her groceries delivered and enjoys the time savings it allows her. The parent who has never walked their kids around the block before COVID-19 may have found the act therapeutic.
As our behaviors change, the way we search and consume media will also change. When designing your Marketing Plan, you’ll need to re-examine your basics: Price, Product, Place and Promotion. If you’re a restaurant and you found success offering family take-out meals during the quarantine, you should consider keeping that product on your menu. As such, people may continue to search online for “family take-out meals”, so you’ll need to optimize your website for that term and make sure it’s included in your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. Don’t have a website or run PPC? You need to take a step to change that, today. In the world we now live in, the average person spends over four hours a day on their smartphones. Your business MUST be accessible to them on that device.
Social Trends Change Even Quicker
With the time we spend online and on social media amplified, trends pop up and gain traction at record speed. If you had an organized social media regimen before COVID-19, where you scheduled content for the week or even month in advance, you’ll need to rethink that or at the very least be flexible.
New trends appear and fade out quicker than ever before. Even though your business isn’t on TikTok, you’ll need to know what’s relevant on that platform this morning because by 11 a.m. it’s all over Instagram, then an hour later on Facebook. Before you know it, the message you had scheduled today at 2 p.m. now comes across as “tone deaf” because there is a taco challenge trending right now and you just posted about burgers.
You can learn to use these trends to your advantage. If there’s a taco challenge trending right now and you sell tacos, then everyone is going to be in the mood to order tacos for dinner. Make a taco special, post about it and boost that post so more people see it. The internet has basically already initiated the desire and brought people into your sales funnel. It’s your turn to make the close.
Riding these trends is sort of like surfing, you get to choose your wave. Go with the flow and let the trend do most of the hard work. While surfing you would never paddle out expecting to catch every single wave. You get into position and wait for the right one. Watch the trends, get into position and choose the right ones for your business to ride.
Social Media is an excellent place to reach new customers and build your business. However, you have to “live and breathe it” to keep up with the trends and keep your messaging relevant. If you still don’t have social media accounts, make that a goal this week.
Speed is Everything
People are looking for information on their phones, and their attention spans have become even shorter. The good news is that publishers such as Google and Facebook understand this and make it easy for you to provide critical information and updates to your customers online.
Make use of the features available to you. Things like “pinning comments” to the top of your Facebook feed or updating your Google listing will make important information about your business easily visible online.
Once your off-site profiles have been updated, take stock of your website. There is no excuse for a slow website; beware of overdesigning. All of the cool animations and huge images can take a toll on how quickly your website loads online. Images are very important for your website but they must be saved in the correct format and have “alt tags” behind them.
- Published in Digital Marketing, Marketing Trends, Web Design
Lazy Devs and Disorganized Bloggers Feeling the Wrath From Google’s Latest Shifts
With only two months of 2020 under our belts we’ve already seen quite a bit of changes on the SEO front as Google has released and taken back several updates both affecting the way the algorithms evaluate pages and the way the ranked results are displayed to users. Although Google maintains that they have not released any core updates following the January core update, reports suggest that smaller updates have been rolled out and tweaked on an ongoing basis- an approach Google confirmed we will see continue via Twitter:
“Some have asked if we had an update to Google Search last week [in November]. We did, actually several updates, just as we have several updates in any given week on a regular basis.” – Google comments following the November Update.
With many websites throughout the internet feeling the impact of the updates released so far this year, we at Strategic Marketing are stepping back to review the past two months of changes, big and small, in order to adjust our strategies as these small updates shed light on what types of website formatting and content Google shifts are assigning value to.
Shifts:January 13th and Beyond
Following Google’s twitter announcement, there was the usual commotion in the SEO community with experts reporting large swings in traffic. Although there was no consensus on exactly the impact of the update, the fluctuations were observed in the health sectors and on dictionary websites.
January 13th also marked the roll out of the new Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layout which included each website’s favicon and replaced the URL with the page’s breadcrumb.
So two things to note here:
1- Don’t forget to upload a custom favicon
2- Keep your website’s content organized in a way that makes it easy for users, and search engines, to understand.
An obvious tell of a lazy developer is that standard wordpress favicon. You know what I’m talking about. That grey globe-looking thing at the top of your website’s browser tab. Hopefully you didn’t hire one of those lazy developers or your QA process was detailed enough to catch that missed opportunity.
Not to worry lazy developers, on January 24th, Google rolled back the favicon and stated that they are testing different favicon layouts. Although today the SERPs are sans favicon, I suspect the icon will make an appearance and advise that you shouldn’t overlook yours.
As far as the URL being replaced by the breadcrumb, this was long overdue. For years Google has been deenfisizing the use of keywords within the url and placing value on a logical, well organized website taxonomy. If you have been following best practices in this area all along, you have nothing to worry about. However, if you have not put effort into organizing your blog posts and landing pages, well, you better start.
Concurrent to the changes in the organic section, Google tweaked how the paid ads appear by placing a bold “Ad” in front for the web address. Based on feedback from AdWords advertisers, they have since changed this back to the green box with Ad in the middle and are still experimenting with different design variations to delineate these snippets as paid placements.
E-A-T Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthines
No matter the google shifts that occur, following SEO best practices will always work out in the long run. We know mobile usability and page speed are critical but above all, the Google Algorithms seek to reward websites offering the best content possible. Does your content display expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness? If your website experiences a downward shift in traffic, reevaluate the content of your site. A great place to start is Google’s blog on the topic: What webmasters should know about Google’s core updates which offers a list of questions designed to advise you on what exactly quality content means to them.
- Published in Digital Marketing, Marketing Trends, Web Design
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