10 Marketing Tactics for businesses to implement during a crisis.
We're all experiencing very difficult times and that's why we all should try to help each other as much as we can.
In the moments of struggle when you running your business, it's hard to stay active, motivated and creative, but now more than ever is when we should keep going and analyse different ways to work on the business strategy to overcome this crisis.
It's difficult to give some advice on how to market your business right now... but I wanted to share some ideas or tactics on how to continue communicating with our audience with respect and always being totally fair with them, without being salesy, as it's not the time for it.
Although it is not a time to run campaigns to sell, you can work on other strategies that can bring value to your audience.
Here's the list of 10 tactics I came up with:
1- SOCIAL MEDIA & CONTENT STRATEGY:
When it comes to communicating on social media, now it's the time to reduce your posts about sales and promotions, and to start publishing supportive and informative content, to help people get through this situation.
An example of good social media communication is:
Zoom.
They are offering loads of different resources on how to use zoom when working from home, as well as other they are making their tool available for free for education centres, well done Zoom!
https://zoom.us/docs/en-us/covid19.html
For other businesses, I understand it might be hard to communicate as it's not easy to come up with creative content when you're struggling to keep your business up and running..
For instance some chefs from top restaurants around the world are offering friendly cooking tips and recipes during this coronavirus outbreak.
Bars and restaurants are offering free deliveries, and gift vouchers for people who want to support and buy now to use when they reopen again. Great idea!
Here's an example from Zahida's Restaurant
Actually if you have a look at the results on the SERPs when searching for restaurant vouchers is full of ads and articles on the media showing support and offering vouchers which is amazing as you can see in the image below, in the UK there has been more than 7,6 k searches, following by Australia with 300 searches...
Here you're some other tips on how to support a local bar/restaurant during this crisis.
https://www.squaremeal.co.uk/restaurants/news/support-your-local-restaurant-covid19_9702
If you are creating and sharing content on your blog, please avoid using Covid19 and coronavirus clickbait strategies to drive more traffic, it's not the time and the moment to take advantage of it..(unless you are actually informing about the virus using trustable and official sources from the government, NHS, etc.....
Instead you should be creating helpful content that supports your audience, try to keeping them calm and avoiding sharing too positive and motivational messages right now....
Ultimately, you must also stop creating content and running ads to promote things that your clients can't consume right now or that aren't not essential, useful or adequate to the current situation....
And of course, when planning content, be mindful of context...
Don't use some terms to promote your content...
2-RUN WEBINARS OR ONLINE TRAININGS
Run webinars sharing valuable content, although you might think, everyone is doing webinars, if you are not one of those, you are missing out as
Here you are a link to the webinar I did last week with other marketers to share our thoughts and ideas on how to overcome this crisis from a Marketing and business point of view..
3- BLOGGING.
Create content for your blog, always educational and taking into consideration that we're in a moment of awareness and consideration, so be creative and helpful with your content.
4- OUTREACH STRATEGY.
Whether or not you should contact your customers during a pandemic depends on what's your relationship with them and your type of business. and the purpose of your communication.
I would say take the opportunity to reach them out to show offer your help and advice as much as possible.
Also you can spend some time reaching out to websites or bloggers to do some guest blogging, and create some content for them now, so you can build some website and brand authority.
4- CUSTOMER RESEARCH & SURVEYS.
Use tools like Zoom, loom or google hangouts to interview your staff or your customers, to ask about their experience with you, record those videos calls and convert them into pieces of content for social media.
Moreover, you can survey customers and clients online to understand more about their pains and improve customer and employee satisfaction...
You can use tools to create surveys like: google forms, typeform or surveymonkey.
(Personally I use typeform)
5- MANAGE YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE AND REPUTATION.
Now more than ever, people are spending time online looking for answers on what to do and how, to understand what's going on in the world.
Here you are a few tactics that you can implement to build trust and reputation with your audience.
- Create a dedicated FAQ page for COVID-19, to keep people informed about everything is going on.
Some examples are:
NHS: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/
Covenant clinic Healthcare: https://www.covenanthealthcare.com/ch/coronavirus-update-and-faqs
- Use structured data and product feeds.
Make sure you check that your item availability status is updated in as consumer demands changes.
Item availability schema for e-commerce sites.
The ItemAvailability structured data type is used to indicate whether a product is InStock, OutofStock, Discontinued, has LimitedAvailability, is available InStoreOnly, OnlineOnly and more.
Event status update
Event organiser cna set the eventStatus markup property to EventCancelled or EventPostponed on their pages. Google advises that organizers maintain the original startDate until the new date is confirmed. After you’ve rescheduled, you can update the startDate and endDate and mark the eventStatus field as eventRescheduled.
Source: Searchenginejournal.com (from this article here)
6- Invest in SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION) + SEM
Organic traffic is growing these days, as people are spending more time on their devices searching for stuff, however they might not be searching and ready to buy your product, so bear in mind now it's the time to create some
5 Reasons why you should not stop investing in SEO
1. Search Engine Marketing can still making you sales.
Search engine marketing, both paid and organic, reaches the consumer when they are in a state of need.
Forget attribution and the top of the funnel.
Search engine marketing produces sales and leads precisely because the consumer is connected with your brand when they are searching for your product or service.
People still need products and services, even if they are self-quarantined for 14 days.
In fact, when people stay home, my bet is they are going to be searching more rather than less.
2. Search is measurable.
In search engine marketing we can measure source traffic, conversions...
Also we can analyse what people are searching
3. When There Is Scarcity, People Search
As people are spending more time at home, they are also searching more for products, whether they are just doing some research now to buy in the future, or they are looking to buy now.... If goods are not available, consumers will search for alternatives.
If you can be in the search results when people are searching for those product or services, your business can be
4. People Still Need Products & Services
On the other hand, people are still needing to buy products, so if you know people are still searching and buying for your product, you should still investing in SEO and PPC.
Obviously, it depends on your sector, your budget and your current situation.
5. Eventually, Things Will Get Back to Normal
As SEO is a medium-long term strategy,
While you can see results from SEO in a short period of time, the overall effectiveness of SEO doesn’t happen overnight.
It takes time to get an SEO campaign to run effectively.
But in the time that we are dealing with global pandemonium, a business could create an SEO campaign that will reap results for years to come.
Source: Search Engine Journal. (article here)
Instead of trying to push on sales, you can do these other SEO/Content tasks:
1- Carry out a website audit.
To optimise your site to be ready when the situation improves in a few months.
2- Do a mini-audit of your content
If you got the time, it's always good to run a mini audit of all your pieces of content: webpages, infographics, blog posts, videos, ebooks, white papers, etc...
Optimise and repurpose your content.
3- Update your google my business page.
Revise and make sure you update your business information on Google My Business to avoid issues with your clients and Google. (keep your clients informed about your temporary close)
Be aware of
4- Link building strategies.
Take some time to analyse and find link opportunities to build the authority of your site and scale up positions on google.
Take time to develop other marketing tactics:
7 -PRACTICE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY MARKETING to help others if you can.
Now more than ever, it's the time to support people, and we've seen loads of brands around the world stepping up to help people in many different ways.
These tactics can help improve your brand reputation,
Some examples:
1- Zara Inditex are donating thousands of masks to hospitals around the world.
https://www.vogue.com/article/zara-inditex-coronvirus-masks-hospital-gowns
2- What the world biggest tech companies are doing to fight coronavirus.
In the article below you can see how tech companies like: Facebook, Uber or Amazon are helping to fight Coronavirus...
Brewdog for instance, are producing sanitiser to send it to people in need for it.
3-Other ideas to support for small businesses:
If you are running a consultancy business you can offer free consultations to support other small business owners that are struggling, no matter if you are a life coach, business coach, marketer, seo consultant, you can offer some of your time to give your advice to other for free, now people need it more than ever!
Here's is me, offering a 30 minutes call + video consultation for free.
I've already helped a few people, and I'd love to help you if need it.
Book a free call with me here.
8- WORK ON YOUR ONLINE REVIEWS STRATEGY
Go through your online reviews
Spend some time going through all your online reviews and answering them all.
Bearing in mind that Google My Business is currently limiting some of their features due to the situation. So check this up first https://support.google.com/business/answer/9792336?hl=en
Take the feedback on board
Other thing you can do, is taking the change to analyse them and see what is clients opinion on your product or service(especially the negative or less positive ones) to take the feedback on board and improve your services for when everything is back to normal.
Ask for more testimonials
And if you can, if the situation allows you to do it, you should ask for google reviews or recommendations to your current or past clients, so you can build more trust with other potential clients.
"90% of consumers believe an online review is more important than getting input from a sales person"
9- STOP & RETHINK YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY (ANALYSE AND MEASURE)
If you have time due to the situation... go through your current Marketing Plan to analyse every action to see what went well and the ones which didn't go as planned, so you can put a more effective plan together when everything is back to normal in a few months.
Go through your plan, analysing your goals, conversions, KIP's, to see what you should be improving in the future.
You can download my digital marketing plan for free clicking the image below.
10- GETTING INTO USING MORE VIDEO & LIVE STREAMING.
The last tactics from the list is related to content creation, but using different formats of video.
People love consuming video these days, so you should be creating using video to share value and useful content with your audience.
Some ideas that you can implement:
1- Q&A's with your audience about services and products
(using zoom or a similar tool) It's a great opportunity to connect and engage with your ideal client and get them know better.
2- Live Webinars on Youtube, Facebook Live or Linkedin Live, you can use tools like: belive, streamyard or gobrunch.
3- Any other form of video to share tips and advice for free with your audience on Social Media (Use Tiktok for fun, Linkedin for pro advice, Facebook pro advice, entertainment and fun stuff, and Instagram for fun and entertainment)
(Recipes, workouts, tips on how to build a website, working from home advice, etc...
To conclude this article, I'd like to say that in these moments of crisis and struggles, is when we all need to remain claim, work hard and smart, and stay more creative than ever to be able to overcome the situation with our businesses up and running.
I hope this advice helps you in any way and I really hope you are well and safe.
And..please. STAY HOME, SAVE LIVES...
Please get in touch with me if you need any further support.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @toninavarroyes