15 Minute to Refresh Digital Marketing Promotion Strategies in COVID-19

The major businesses are suffering because of this coronavirus situation and it has cost more than 76bn dollars around the world. 

The product companies and brands are struggling to manage operations and the marketing strategies that directly impact them, especially small service companies. As a result, the inflow of new clients or projects has stopped or reduced. 

According to the amperity research data, the local market demand dropped by 84%.  The lockdown period has changed the customers’ behavior where 45% of customers are spending more time on social media and 10% are creating online videos, according to the Global Web Index.

News about Coronavirus is on top of every search result in Google, news, and social media. So it is only logical that the post talking about or around COVID-19 gets more visibility in the market. 

Many common digital marketing techniques are not working during this critical period, marketers are stuck and are constantly trying to find new techniques that might work during this pandemic. Since I’ve been going through the same struggle which has led me to interesting findings,  have decided to share some of them that might help you increase brand awareness and keep it live in the market. 

1. Keep a close watch on Google Trends

Google trends is always a good tool to keep ourselves up to date with market trends. And it hasn’t changed even with this outbreak. Additionally, subscribe to Google Alerts of the related keywords to understand your industry searches and then craft a marketing and content strategy around those trends that work for your business. The key here would be to be extremely active in churning out content as well as the execution of the strategies.

To help businesses understand the market better during these times, Google released a coronavirus search trends dedicated landing page. So, you can easily keep yourself up to date with hub data, search interests and figures and also react based on your priorities and the trends. 

2. Engage with your customers through Social media

Research shows that the customers are more likely to spend time on social media, so you have to shift your more focus on social media, content marketing, and creative posts. 

Usually, companies’ revenue follows the 80/20 principle of sales. Therefore, you need to recalculate paid budget allocation and allocate extra budget for social media ads. We can expect that this activity will help you cover some revenue loss during this crisis and helps the sales team to perform well. 

Keep in constant communication with your business partners, entities, customers, etc. Closely monitor the competitor brands’ activities and keep your strategy updated day by day during this crisis. Ultimately your goal should be to keep your customers engaged with your brand for which I recommend very old yet effective 5/3/2 content sharing techniques.  

3. Content will be your savior

It’s time to stop your regular content cycle and create a new content strategy that works for your brand, helps you interact directly with your customers. First of all, understand how your users are affected by COVID-19, by research or actually talking to some of them. Then publish content that solves their problems without actually selling or pitching your products or services. 

In fact, most of the companies focus more on creating content that creates a lot of buzz on the web. As mentioned before, it’s important to quickly react to the situation and create relevant content on various topics without affecting quality. Additionally, you can add product use cases with the current COVID-19 situation and promote it on content distribution channels. Again, you will have to make sure to keep the tone of your content informative and helpful whereas having a particular product is not the main agenda but the solution is.

4. Focus on brand and reputation management

Many popular brands suggest that build content hubs, keep customers up to date. But how to actually do it?

New marketing techniques don’t work during the COVID-19 recession period

-says Parth Pandya who has 12+ years experience in marketing.

During this critical period, you need to keep in touch with the customer via various channels to maintain a reputation among them and in the market.

Below are some recommendations that can help you get started.

• Update hours on Google My Business & social media
• Participate in FAQs
• Increase activities on social media, interact more with your audience
• Actively participate in the discussions via like, share, comments features

Ultimately, it all boils down to publishing informative content and letting customers know how you are helping them. That’s all!

5. Invite Bloggers to Write Content

To generate a good amount of effective content, invite other guest bloggers, influencers to write on your website which is one of the best and easiest ways to get fresh content. You need to maintain the quality of content and only accept, publish industry-relevant content. 

HARO is a database of sources for journalists from where I have founded various industry questions related to the current situation that will be published on reputed new websites. Try to answer industry questions and that will really help you to generate big buzz in the current market. 

Vice versa, you can also use HARO to ask a question and take opinions from industry experts by asking the right questions. There are several other options also available in the market with similar functionality. 

Publish a weekly and monthly roundup post that includes general news, your company news, and industry news as well. 

6. Organize webinars on advanced topics

Video marketing is one of the trending marketing techniques in 2020. Go live during this recession time. There are multiple ways to engage with existing and new potential customers. Major people are free at home or are working from home, so it’s really the best time for your business to get traction. 

Understanding targeted audiences is the most important step in conducting webinars. The next step would be to perform research on the advanced topics being asked around the industry and then creating relevant material for the same. As far as its marketing goes, you can invite some industry leaders or influencers to collaborate with you on the same. That should give you the traction among the right audience. You can always tap into your current website traffic and add a landing page or pop-up to get subscribers for the same. The main thing is to provide value and then you wouldn’t have to worry about getting people for your webinars. 

Regarding the platform, you can go live using Facebook Live or Instagram Live. These platforms can also be used to organize a healthy discussion with your customers which can help you gather information required for webinar topics. 

Again, it will be ideal for you to conduct 3-4 webinars and analyze the results against the efforts to see if it is working for you or not.

Pro Tip: The webinars can be easily converted into video assets for your brand which can be later utilized to add value to your brand.

7. Monitor behavior on Google Analytics

One of the most important things is to keep your eyes on your google analytics and monitor daily traffic. Without numbers & solid data, you can not create an effective strategy that works. Numbers always give a sense of the performance of newly adopted strategies. 

With google analytics annotation marker, you can note the details of the plan, event, content sharing, etc. which can easily help you identify what is working for you. It should help you to better understand visit flows and closely monitor change in user behavior due to the specific activities and COVID-19 impact. 

To track any major change, use alerts of GA to get a notification such as a drop/jump in traffic, goal completes, low sales, high social media reach, etc.

Conclusion

I hope the above points will help you to understand the current market and cope with it too.

To summarize, we need to focus on the latest trends, be active on social media and help our customers during this COVID-19 crisis. 

Try and put it in motion above ideas that you think works for your business or industry. I hope you get positive traction for your brand as well as the website.  

No one can surely guarantee what may work and what may not! The whole world is going through a horrible situation where no one has a clear idea about what to do. It’s all trial and error. 

Now audience, It’s your turn to give me an update!

Share in comments which techniques are working for your business/client?

Stay Safe! Stay Home!