How to Navigate Your Business Digitally During The Global Pandemic
April 9, 2020
Sarvesh Bagla
The COVID-19 outbreak has made many businesses wind up or at least operate from home, forcing them to rework their Internet marketing strategies among many other things. The Young Presidents’ Organization’s (YPO) survey indicated that 82% of business leaders are expecting significant declines in revenues over the course of the next six months. These figures look bleak. How, then, does a business owner channel his marketing spend intelligently and stay afloat during these times?
Build short-term and long-term strategies:
We don’t know how long this pandemic will last. Therefore, you need to form:
- Short term strategies to stay visible and relevant during this difficult time. This is a great opportunity to focus on building a connection with your customer and doing some brand building.
- Long term strategies to rebound from a business slump and bring back lost customers.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a manufacturing business or a service provider – your strategies would be loosely based on the same principle.
Short term strategies
Re-visit your keywords and market the right ones
Times have changed and so have keyword searches. It comes as no surprise that keywords like “online medicines” and “video conferencing” have skyrocketed. Even if your business has nothing to do with these, take heart.
For instance, if you’re a gym owner your keyword search may just have to change from “best gym in South Beach” to “best ab workouts”. Put out your workout videos on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. You could do aggressive SEO by hiring a seo company, to make sure your video ranks high and gets maximum traffic. You could support this with ads and posts on social media.
Again, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in – there are ways to working around how you can remain visible online.
Also Read: How To Increase Organic Traffic
Focus on reduced CPCs
If you have some funds to spare on marketing efforts, use them to run paid ads. Because of the economic crisis, most businesses are now cutting costs, especially from their marketing budget. This is why ads are becoming less competitive and are more affordable.
Using ads will help you advertise your business more effectively to a large audience in a small budget and more quickly. Just ensure that you’re targeting the right audience and there’s no spill-over.
Let your audience feel your presence
Let your audience know that you’re still around. Send them emailers to let them know what you’re doing – whether you’re delivering, giving food and shelter to the needy, helping your employees or just doing your bit by staying home and staying safe. This is a great time to get creative and put this out in the form of videos on your social media channels. They don’t have to cost a thing.
Offer free or paid-for online services
If you’re in the education sector, you can offer tutorials via Skype, Zoom, or Google Hangouts.
Even if you’re a fitness service provider or therapist, you can take sessions with your customers online. This is a great way to showcase your goodwill and keep your customers happy. Ask your channel subscribers to sign-up for premium content by paying online. Even if they don’t pay for your videos you have a better chance of them buying your membership/services when things do get back to normal.
If you’re in Banking & Finance, you could offer quality advice on financial management in these trying times. You could generate meaningful content in the form of videos, blog posts and quora answers.
Organize a Webinar or an Event Online
Cancelled events have caused financial losses and heartache for many. This doesn’t mean that all is lost.
With time and the Internet at its disposal, you have a captive audience that is happy to use Facebook Live and Instagram Live to participate in online events.
Live stream your product launch, store opening ceremony, or company anniversary celebration on social media to engage your audience and build an online presence. You can even offer discount codes to the first few people streaming your event. Or tell all those watching, something interesting about your product. This is a great way to grab their attention.
Also Read: B2B Lead Generation
Use Relevant Hashtags
Ubiquitous but very useful nonetheless, hashtags are your go-to in these troubling times.
Maximizing your business reach on social media by using hashtags is a good way to grow your online presence.
Here are a few coronavirus-related hashtags that you can use in your posts:
- #StopTheSpread – To stop the spread of COVID-19
- #JOMO – A light-hearted hashtag that stands for Joy of Missing Out – used to embrace cancelled plans and staying indoors
- #FOMO – The opposite of JOMO – Fear of Missing Out
- #Social Distancing – Break from in-person socialization to prevent the spread of COVID-19
Do some charity
The world needs your kindness more than ever. Find out what you can do to help in these times of crisis. At the same time, you can let your potential customers see that your brand is a responsible corporate citizen. This is the best time to genuinely do good and build goodwill with your audience too.
Also, if you’ve closed down your business operations and allowed your team to work from home, spread this message to other business leaders using relevant hashtags.
This way, you’re letting the world know that you’re doing your bit in these difficult times.
Long term strategies
After this pandemic is over and life limps back to normal, chances are that your business will need to cover a lot of ground to regain customers and revenues.
Post-pandemic strategies merit a separate blog post altogether and we’ll be putting that out over the coming weeks.
Take-away
In the interim, it is best to concentrate on your short-term strategies, because the future is quite uncertain. Stay focused on remaining visible, not letting your customers forget you and offering services in the best way that you can in the current scenario.
If you would like some tips on how to reshape your online marketing strategy, please get in touch with a digital marketing agency. In the meanwhile, stay home and stay safe!