How Digital Marketing in The Time of Covid-19 May Save Businesses

From all indications, the Coronavirus is likely to hang about for much longer than most of us anticipated. Many businesses have been forced to either scale down their operations or shut down entirely. This has naturally meant that revenues have shrunk and many are struggling to maintain their workforces.

Marketing budgets have been hard hit as organisations reassess their spending. However, while cutting back in some areas may be the best thing to do, there is also a need to evaluate what marketing approaches are still worth pursuing.

With minimal movement and more people stuck at home, a failure to invest in digital marketing is a missed opportunity. People are spending more time online and making their purchases remotely. In fact, the home delivery business is amongst the very few industries that are still flourishing. By strengthening your online presence, you improve the odds that your business will bounce back faster when the economy reopens.

This is the best time to grow your online presence, generate leads, and stimulate sales. Given the cost effective nature of digital marketing, it is an investment that offers good value for money. You will also likely gain a competitive edge over other businesses that are slow to adopt this approach.

Here are some good online marketing strategies you can apply to help keep your brand on people’s minds, even if you are yet to reopen.

This downtime offers much free time for those in business to establish themselves as authorities in their niches. Creating interesting and educational content is a great way to accomplish this. Read up on current trends and work on smart content that will capture audience interest.

Be sure to look up SEO rules to adhere to, but do emphasise creating quality and naturally flowing narratives. Focus on local SEO strategies as this period has proven that surrounding communities are best placed to help keep businesses going. Also, work on your keyword strategy so you can know what to aim for when trying to build your websites rankings.

People spent on average 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media a day, in 2019. With the widespread curfews, lockdowns, and shutdowns of 2020, you can expect this figure to rise considerably. Engaging current and potential clients on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is vital. You can publish your own articles, share from other content creators, highlight trending topics, and even just entertain.

Be sure to be responsive to comments so your followers feel heard and valued. Where possible, also consider developing video and animation materials. The creativity that goes into such content has proven highly appealing to most audiences and does not need to be all that sophisticated.

For those who are looking to maximise their online exposure, PPC marketing is a worthwhile option. This is because many businesses are cutting back on their advertising spending, giving a chance to those willing to invest the opportunity to capture traffic and convert this into sales. It will make your brand more visible at a time when others are fading back awaiting the revival of the economy, notwithstanding the cost-per-clicks is also declining. Maintaining visibility consistently will help reap big rewards in the short to long term.

Conclusion

The urge under the current climate may be to not invest or reduce your current marketing budget. However, by doing this you not only cut your business off from potential customers, you are also going to extend the length of time required for your business to fully recover.

Therefore, we highly recommend you keep investing into your digital marketing or even consider increasing your efforts. With so many companies doing the opposite, you will find you will be getting much better returns, greater visibility and potentially more enquiries due to a temporarily diminished level of competition. Regardless of Covid-19, your long-term business goals and ambitions have not changed, therefore your marketing strategy needs to reflect this.