Recent coronavirus crisis has affected every entity in this world. How are businesses supposed to connect with customers during the quarantine period? The answer is brand-specific effective digital marketing strategies. The consumption of online content, social media platforms, OTT platforms and gaming apps have increased in a very little span of time. A few of the organizations are realizing the value of advertising by keeping in contact with their customers during this difficult time.
Digital Marketing strategies are important for every business whether it’s a small one or a known brand. This is the best time to refocus on digital marketing strategies and reach out to the maximum audience already interested in the product but unaware of it. To survive this crisis businesses will have to adapt. They will have to find new ways to engage and earn the audience’s trust.
Due to this crisis, the industry’s traffic has either declined or inclined. As per Neil Patel’s article, the following is the current situation:
Image Source: Neil Patel
From an SEO perspective, there is a huge drop in organic traffic for most industries (like advertising, agriculture, construction, eCommerce, education, energy, insurance, manufacturing, real estate, retail, software, technology, telecom, transportation and travel). And, because of necessity items, a few industries (like food, healthcare, media, finance and pharma) has shown growth in organic traffic.
How to adapt the digital marketing strategies in a time of crisis like the COVID-19 outbreak? Here are some strategies that can be opted as per the company’s requirement:
Social Media Marketing Strategies
The customers will be online more than ever and the businesses can target the selective audience. What digital marketing strategies does a brand should follow in a crisis like now? Here are some tips for social media marketing- digital marketing:
1. Be loyal to the audience: Popular saying, a brand doesn’t attract an audience, a brand is its audience. No matter how flashy your logo, how your product performs, or what clever marketing tactics you employ, your brand will ultimately be determined not by what it is, but by WHO it attracts.
2. Importance of Audience: Put the audience first and understand what matters most, what the audience is looking for and what isn’t the audience getting from other brands.
3. Value of Authenticity: The audience is not looking for unrealistic things. They are looking for something to relate to the product.
4. Engage with the audience: Engagement with the audience is the key. Interacting with the audience, solving their queries, making them aware of the changes in the brand sentiment. Creating a campaign, challenge, or live stream on any social platform is how businesses can connect at the time of social distancing and get creative.
5. What channels the audiences are using: Of all the social media sites out there, the top ones include Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Ohh-wait there are some brands new to the market and giving tough competition to the old ones.
6. Video Conferencing: Video conferencing is the most used feature. Most of the audiences are active on Instagram live, Zoom and private messaging apps too.
7. Creative content: As said earlier, audiences are looking for something to relate with. Businesses can explore AR and VR experiences. Make the audience aware of the fake news spreading all across the world. If the business has an upcoming event planned rather than cancelling it, plan for a live stream event. It is one of the most valued and used features for brands today, as we are all isolated and for our sanity, we need human interaction.
During this crisis or any, brands should focus on being more creative with the social media posts, connecting with the customers, strengthening their trust in the brand and winning their confidence and not on pushing sales messages or emails.
Content Marketing Ideas
An effective digital marketing strategy is incomplete without a well thought content marketing plan. Content marketing plays a crucial role considering the brands need to communicate effectively with their customers and keep them updated about the ongoing services and changes. During the challenging time like Coronavirus pandemic or any other crisis, the businesses need to respond in a way that can help the business to survive.
Due to the cancellation of events, a few brands are turning to content marketing so that they can directly deliver and stay engaged with their subscribers/customers. It is an effective way for brands to provide customers with the content of value increasing brand awareness and engagement. Here are some tips for content marketing- digital marketing:
1. Informational: Content marketing allows brands to develop a relationship with customers through content which is not promotional but informational. At the time of crisis, they seek content that entertains, inspires and informs them.
2. Content Trends: Video content is the next big thing across the world. Video means higher engagement and maximum outreach not just in 2020 but beyond. Businesses can use video as a marketing tool for various purposes like product demos, video blogs, live event videos, ads, webinars, tutorials, etc.
3. SEO friendly content: Google search algorithms constantly change and businesses have to be updated with the latest changes to survive. Focus on what your customers want to read, what keeps them engaged, find the relevant keywords, determine your search intent, build your content, optimize it and then publish. Even after publishing, you have to keep it up to date, make changes and add some more information as you can get.
4. What not to do: Producing irrelevant content or updating it just for the sake of more reach and engagement will affect your business in a negative way. In content marketing, the content that is made public should have a meaning and spread genuine information. Believing that an audience will form a conclusion without your help and guidance isn’t the best strategy. Communication is the key here.
SEO Strategies
For businesses to survive, you must embrace yourselves for the negative economic impact and position yourself through these uncertain times. Start enhancing your existing digital marketing strategies and roadmaps by understanding the rapid changes in SEO techniques. Here are some tips for SEO and digital marketing:
1. Enhancement and Audit: Priority should be enhancing the content that is directly tied up to the performance instead of implementing something new. You can use free tools like Screaming Frog to crawl your site. Closely monitor to see if your site is being crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines to identify if any issues can arise in the near future.
2. Analysis: Analyse whether the session time or impressions are increasing or decreasing. Even if it seems to be decreasing make sure that it doesn’t affect the ranking of the site.
3. SERPs: All businesses fight for our site’s ranking to be on the top of the primary page but when it comes to the first page, somehow the main aim was forgotten. Even when the site’s ranking pops up to second or third position the businesses have to dig deep and plan accordingly for achieving the position zero and learn about rich snippets, paragraph snippets, data table snippets, video carousels, and local business results.
4. Google My Business: People have reduced travel and won’t go far. Even if they leave their houses (exceptional cases only please stay at home guys), they’ll look for the places nearby to get some supplies of any kind. If you are on GMB but haven’t given any importance then you should start improvising it. If you are not on GMB at all, then create an account and you’ll be able to reach the customers nearby who are interested in your product but aren’t aware of.
5. Long term SEO Strategies: Writing new blogs to engage a new set of audiences as well as updating old content. It also includes technical SEO, link building, regular keyword optimization, content & site audits, and strategic internal linking.
6. Link Building: SEO and link building never stays the same. Nowadays building high-quality links is very important. Start building no-follow links to maintain your site and a few sources of building no-follow links are blog comments, forum posts, editable Wikipedia pages, guest book comments, yahoo answers and guest post signatures.
7. Online Review Strategy: Getting reviews to help boost customer loyalty towards a brand but not engaging in a review can create a bad impact. You don’t have to react to every review separately or manually. Create a review policy, write some template responses, use some tools to monitor reviews and get alerts.
Some examples of the marketing approach seen to be opted by the businesses during a crisis like a coronavirus pandemic:
- Brand-building campaigns or working on long term investments in the business and reduce investments on campaigns to drive short-term sales or business outcomes.
- After the lockdown, customers may not return to their regular routine or habits. To face such disruption, advanced analysis and tracking data are being done for optimization to better meet customers’ needs.
- With events being cancelled, advertisers are focusing on budgets for new plans.
- Online Reputation Management (ORM): You can provide recent announcements or relevant information linked with the CDC and WHO with to your customers. The posts also include corporate messaging, limited product availability, or special services that are of basic significance to the customers.
Opportunities Available in Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing skills are highly in demand. Because of this crisis, you have the opportunity to learn what this profile has to offer (if you have interest). Businessmen, students, fresh job seekers, almost everyone can learn and start their career with the help of digital marketing skills.
What kind of skills do you need to master?
Social Media Influencers, Artificial Intelligence, Online Video Streaming, Augmented and Virtual Reality, Content Developer and SEO.
Which sector is battling the most by going digital due to this crisis?
No doubt the education industry has changed a lot in the past couple of years. But due to the coronavirus pandemic, the industry has changed its learning approach. Now when students can’t attend school but have to learn and study so they are going digital.
Most schools have decided to go digital and have asked the teacher to plan a presentation and take classes from home. Else everyone who is either preparing for high school or any entrance exam has opted for the online courses and online coaching. But somehow surely it is affecting the schools and colleges.
Wrapping it up
Businesses will struggle for a while. The struggle will be for over a year as all the running businesses will have to cover for the losses they are facing right now.
Stay safe, stay healthy and keep moving forward. Yes, crises happen but they are temporary. Permanent are people and the business who compliment each other. Comment below what are your opinions and what points from this article helps you in building your digital marketing strategies.
