We are in an uncertain times and COVID-19 pandemic has opened a gateway and showed the importance of digital marketing in businesses today. With this fact, it’s a must to rely on digital strategy.
Why? Because doing so can be the deciding factor whether your business can make it through the hard times coming ahead of us. Events and other marketing efforts planned for a long time were cancelled and face to face business has become a huge challenge.
How will businesses survive through this if there are no ongoing contingencies that can mitigate the losses? The key to resilience is to develop and adapt to various marketing strategies.
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Look at what the virus has done to some brands in terms of marketing. Cruise and airline industry reduced, paused or postponed all of their ad campaigns due to the current pandemic situation that the world is in right now.
Many have started telecommuting to minimize the load on public transport and as part of the social distancing measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. The pandemic has made a huge impact in many businesses resulting to the quick downfall of the economy.
Any strategies of driving sales and foot traffic to brick-and-mortar businesses are most probably seeing a decrease in efforts and effectiveness. Many big companies are facing potential losses worth millions due to cancelled events. For smaller businesses especially the ones that are dependent on word-of-mouth referrals, the loss could come as a shock.
Employing the right online and internet marketing strategy to stay connected with existing customers as well as to generate new leads may be the best way to help the businesses survive in this current crisis. For businesses that does not have any social accounts and website, perhaps now it’s the best time for them to consider social marketing, content marketing and establish effective SEO strategy as part of their marketing plan.
You can evaluate the current status of their marketing plans. The first question you can ask is what are the offline marketing channels you can implement in this difficult time? Examples like re-purpose some of your outdoor advertising billboards, adding message of support, medical supplies donations and participating in the activities in the community to interact with clients are just a few of the re-calibration you can do during this crisis.
Next, think of a way to port your offline channels to the web space successfully. This is where you need to target and optimize your web content to create effective online marketing campaigns. And also, consider choosing the online platform that can reach out to your customers and improving the visibility and promotion strategy at the same time.
Take this opportunity to fine-tune your digital assets:
- Your website content should contain the appropriate marketing message with right call to action.
- Check your current website organic search ranking results and implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to generate more traffic to your website.
- Generate new and enticing contents such as new blog post, video storyboard, and writing newsletter for your customers. Create contents that can be part of social conversation and be shared around easily.
- Press release and articles that have relevant topics can help in informing your customers on the latest development and updates on your businesses.
- Build up their social media engagement by exploring search and social channels like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google AdWords and strategize to improve customer’s engagement.
It’s all about adaptability. For those business’ that need to go out and meet their new clients face to face, adapting changes may include utilizing social media platforms or creating new channels over the Internet. In the coming days and months, you will realize your potential customers will be hesitant to let you walk through the door and give you a handshake. We don’t know as to how long this pandemic will last.
In uncertain times like this, and with the upsurge of working remotely, businesses are now turning to digital channels and accepting this transformation. During the last few weeks, there have been evident spike from businesses that would like to update or build websites, launch new channels for e-commerce and make social media promotions focused on home-workers and employing Search Engine Optimization to reach out to their audiences.
This quarantine period has given the marketers the perfect time to develop their digital strategies. If your business has previously made token efforts into the digital marketing channels, for the reason like many other brands, now it will be the time to revisit them. You can simply give your social pages and website a refresh.
At this point, business survival matters more than dominating the market. Businesses that employs digital marketing shift more strategically and it provides a long-term value even when this pandemic ends and everything goes back to normal. Business will become more resilient as ever to deal with future crisis.
