How to Adapt Your Marketing During Coronavirus?
Should I be marketing during the Coronavirus?
This question is top-of-mind for most business owners, and unfortunately, there’s no easy answer, however, in this short article, we explain what some of our most clever Thinkroom clients are focusing on, and how they’ve shifted their marketing spend to adapt. First and foremost, the Coronavirus isn’t a show-stopper for most business in Australia. In fact, it’s effect is just accelerating the importance of having a robust digital marketing focus and online strategies. The challenge, however, is that the online world is vast and understanding how and where to advertise is a full-time role in itself. Our team at Thinkroom, based here in Noosa, Sunshine Coast, act as Marketing Co-ordinators for clients and naturally, we’ve had some hearty conversations with some of the savviest business owners in Australia about re-evaluating their marketing strategies & budgets. So this begs the question;
Should you be tightening the belt & cutting your marketing budgets?
Or should you be aggressively increasing your marketing spend and paid social media advertising to ensure you retain your stronghold? Again, there’s no easy answer for this because it’s industry dependant, but we do have several strategies that can apply to all businesses regardless of your current consumer demand levels.
#1 Marketing Tone
Tone your marketing appropriately. When others are struggling, barely hanging onto their livelihoods, people may, in fact, become offended by standard marketing practices. Soften your tone, and rather than a hard-selling approach, offer support and useful advice.
#2 SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Regardless of whether demand has plummeted or not, the Coronavirus isn’t going to last forever, and while it may not be profitable to advertise while no one is currently buying, you want to ensure you’re able to bounce back at a moment’s notice. Long-term marketing strategies such as SEO can deliver compounding lead generation results for the life of your business, so it’s essential you don’t lose your market position in the digital marketing space. If cash flow allows it, redirect your advertising budget that would otherwise be spent on Social Media Advertising or Google Ads towards optimising your website (SEO). Now let’s be clear;
Marketing and advertising are not the same. Digital advertising is only a component of digital marketing, and our point above is that shifting your digital advertising budgets to concentrate on your online marketing is the trend that we endorse and are currently seeing from savvy businesses. #3 Content Marketing
Content Marketing is known as one of the best marketing practices in 2020, meaning that you need to be vlogging, blogging, podcasting, posting & sharing regular articles of unique content to stay relevant to Google searchable to consumers. Content marketing is essential, but the challenge here is that even if you were a gifted copywriter, where would you find the time while running your empire? We see this as the inevitable rise of the Gig economy, where people who have been made redundant during the Coronavirus will seek work-from-home jobs, as copywriters, and connect with digital marketing agencies such as Thinkroom. Partnering with a marketing agency similar to Thinkroom engages a team of marketing coordinators who create and drive the agreed strategy, accessing and quality-controlling our network of talented freelancers. You get to relax and have analytics reported to you of your digital marketing success. #4 Social Media Advertising
If you’re experiencing a drop in demand, then your lead generation methods shouldn’t be stopped entirely. Use this time to test, measure, collaborate, and work things out that you may not have seen previously. Within Google AdWords and Facebook marketing’s tool “Business Manager”, you’ll find analytics, and you’ll study any advertising period or date-range you wish. You may have always been too busy to give this valuable data the time it deserves. Smart businesses are reducing their spend on platforms such as Facebook advertising, but they are not stopping altogether. This is an opportune time to test variations in campaigns, particularly in Google Ads, to measure how consumers respond differently to different approaches. #5 Google Trends
Google Trends. With all the above in mind, you may want to ensure you’re aware of what’s trending; what people are searching. Google trends are regularly used by Marketing Agency’s to understand consumer behaviour. This may help your digital marketing strategy redirect, and secure new revenues that may not be apparent in are the fast-changing online marketing world we live in. —– So all-in-all, the current Coronavirus economy is an opportunity to work on your business, rather than in your business. You can enhance your SEO marketing, your content marketing, which will improve your medium to long-term results and eventuate to organic lead generation. After all, every business wants to know how to get more leads.
Over & Out, Thinkroom.
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