How to market your business during Coronavirus
The importance of brand presence during Covid-19
Undecided about what to do about your marketing during coronavirus? Don’t leave it to chance.
As we continue to adapt to lockdown life and keeping our businesses relevant, many of us are asking ourselves the question: “What’s the point of marketing when there is no one to sell to?”
As budgets are hit hard with rapidly declining revenues, marketing is often the first “luxury” to get the chop. However, it’s never that straightforward. If you want to stand a chance coming through this with a business still intact, then maintaining presence in the market is vital.
What kind of marketing is effective during these times?
That all depends on your product or service you sell, yet the key point here is relevance. Whatever content you choose to share with your audience should be well-meaning, relevant and conscientious. Your customers and prospects are still out there consuming content through their usual channels, however their needs will be changing and the ways they will choose to engage with your brand will be different.
For example, if your business is operating an ecommerce site selling jewellery your usual plan of special offers and new product launches may seem a bit insensitive and irrelevant when people don’t have much spare cash to spend on luxury items or the opportunity to wear them. Instead, you could adapt your marketing plan to consist of themed content articles that perhaps talk about ways customers should still create special events during lockdown where they can get dressed for dinner, putting on the glitz for that next group video call with your friends etc.
You could create a piece of content that talks about jewellery trends through the ages and then showcase some of your products that are inspired by these. This way you are subtly keeping your brand and your products front of mind without pushing desperate discounts down peoples’ throats is a discounting war that will not be good for long term survival of your business.
Competitions and Genuine Discounts
I’m not saying that all offers and discounts should be side-lined, just that if you are like me, I’m getting rather tired of the constant barrage of permanent sales and promos I get from brands on what seems like a daily basis via email and paid social media placements. I’m much more likely to engage with a product or offer that will help me in this current situation or that provides me with feel-good content that is a distraction from the more sombre state of affairs.
Polls & Surveys
With that in mind, competitions and giveaways will still be a good way of increasing reach for your brand and driving engagement with your products and services. Think about combing an interesting short questionnaire that complements your message and use it as a way of gathering some market research on what your customers are looking for at the moment. Most social media and email marketing platforms offer easy to use polls and survey tools which can help you gather data.
New ways of interacting with customers
Are you struggling to transition your business model from a traditional retail environment? Have you furloughed your marketing department? If this is the case then you are probably looking for fresh, efficient ways to trade and reach out to your audience.
If you’re struggling with time to create and post content for your social media channels, consider how you can use 3rd party content and sharing to bolster your presence. Not all content needs to be self-originating, so consider mixing up your schedule by following other complementary businesses and commenting and sharing some of their posts which you feel you would like to associate your brand with that your audience would find interesting. For example, if you are a restaurant you may wish to check out some businesses in the health and fitness industries and share any good lifestyle content they create with a link to your own healthy eating recipes recipes people could make at home.
Remarketing
If you haven’t tried remarketing yet, this may be a good time to start. For example, you could set up a Facebook ad campaign that targets people who are already browsing on your website. During lockdown we will all be spending more time on our devices, so whilst spending power may be down, time is ripe for driving brand awareness and consideration for those purchases people will still be making.
What about if my business is closed for the foreseeable future and I have nothing to sell?
If you have had to temporarily cease trading, don’t shut up shop completely. As you will have time on your hands, use it to research future product and service ideas, and with the resources you have still available to work (it my be just you if you’re a business owner and have furloughed your team) make the effort to keep in regular contact with your customer base. It would be a good idea to post on your social channels once a week, and perhaps use the time to start writing some blogs which will in turn hep the performance of your website SEO and give you some content to share on your social channels.
Where to place spend and what to cut back
If you are in an industry that’s been drastically affected by Covid-19 then of course it’s sensible to scale back your marketing spend where appropriate. There are many elements of the mix that don’t require big budgets (such as email and organic social), so think about scaling back your paid digital advertising if you can’t sell your full product range at the moment but think carefully about ceasing campaigns altogether. This is especially pertinent if you have ongoing Google Ad campaigns. The way Google builds up its intelligence on your keywords and bid strategy means that of you pause a campaign completely you risk losing much of your credibility on Google’s search rankings and ad placement when you switch back on. Instead, reduce the daily budget to a bare minimum just to keep the ads ticking over.
Paid Social
Social media paid ads work differently in that pausing will not affect the future success of any campaigns, you will simply lose the insights of any particular creative performance during this time. However, paid social is one of the cheapest ways of reaching a new audience, so if brand awareness is a key goal during this time then perhaps upping your social ad budget and decreasing print ads for example is a good strategy for you.
With a reduced team, focus your smaller resources on content creation, email and organic social channels and any specific media that still gains traction. For example, if you already use radio this is a great medium with more people likely to be listening whilst working from home. Update your ads to reflect the current situation to directly inform people of what you can offer today, therefore demonstrating good conscience and relevance.
Shortcuts to content creation
If you use one of the popular email platforms such as Mailchimp, you also have the ability to create social ads and additional web landing pages yourself (subject to subscription level) with minimal specialised skills from the same software if you cannot afford your regular agency services.
Utilise existing brand assets or consider a short term subscription to image libraries or graphic design services such as Canva if your current creative team or agency is not available and you need to create new imagery to accompany your content.
I hope that this has given you some food for thought. If you are unfamiliar with your business’s email marketing tools or social platforms, please feel free to get in touch for some short-term assistance until your full team is restored.
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