The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has completely reshaped everything that 2020 was going to be for digital brands. With aggressive actions being taken by the governments across the globe to slow the spread of the pandemic, nearly every organization is feeling the impact now. While some businesses that provide essential or near-essential services are still flourishing, most are experiencing significant performance drops.
We’re already seeing a major behavioral shift, with people avoiding going to not only work, but stores, shopping malls, restaurants, and other public places where money could be spent. As a result, many businesses are checking out options where they can maximize efficiency and trim budgets.
As a business owner, it could be tempting for you too to revise your marketing budget amid worries about an impending recession but in reality, halting the digital marketing campaigns now might have an even more negative impact on future opportunities.
As Bare Bones Marketing has been working with the clients to appropriately respond to covid-19 concerns and making strategic adjustments in their digital marketing efforts, we’ve observed some key factors that you can leverage through digital marketing, albeit in a strategic way.
The foundation of these factors is that people are staying online mostly than walking the sidewalks or in their cars. Therefore, anything online today will be consumed more and faster than ever before.
Let’s take a look at a compilation of our observations.
Focus on PPC advertising: Strengthening your PPC or pay-per-click advertising to connect with your consumers could bring a competitive advantage your way. On average, CPC in mid-March has decreased significantly from what was in January and it’s assumed to continue to decrease, lowering the money you’d pay a publisher for an ad click.
Strengthen your local SEO: Since people have restricted their travel and are staying close to their homes, they’re naturally looking for nearby supplies and services. If you can optimize your website for local SEO, you’d stand a good chance to make your local people turn to you first. First, you should start by optimizing your Google My Business account to establish your presence. Then you need to focus on things like getting regular reviews from your customers, optimizing for voice search, authoring content based on your local events or news stories, optimizing your site for mobile, incorporating locally relevant keywords in your site’s URL, meta content, and copy, increasing your visibility in online business directories, among others.
Online is crucial: As gatherings have been made restricted in almost every major city across the world, it can be assumed that any event, conference, and other in-person meets are going to be deferred at least for a couple of months from now. And these include sales visits, customer service visits, and similar personal touches that are needed to maintain top-notch customer support and in turn, profitability. Therefore, it’s important for businesses to try recreating that in-person experience online. You can try to leverage webinars, informational presentations, Twitter chats, group text messaging apps, and other secure digital communication channels to maintain your brand’s customer-first approach.
Apart from these, you should improve your site’s user experience, build more engaging email marketing campaigns, and explore social media marketing – all geared toward increasing online conversions.
Wrapping up
Remember that the worst possible response is silence. If your brand doesn’t address your customers’ critical issues, they’ll get the answers from somewhere else. Therefore, get prepared as much as you can to be able to respond proactively to your customers’ questions and concerns by maintaining a robust online presence.
Enlisting a reputable agency like Bare Bones Marketing will enable you to offer your customers a consistent and compelling experience whenever they interact with your brand. To know how we can help you during this difficult time, feel free to reach out to us through email: info@barebones-marketing.com or phone: 512.571.2296.