At the onset of the coronavirus lockdown, many companies put their digital marketing process on hold. However, digital marketing is a set of strategic implementations that deliver long-term benefits for you. It should never be paused or stopped. And if you would do so:
- All your ranking positions will experience a downward trend.
- You will notice a sharp decline in your traffic.
- With traffic, there will also be a downfall in the number of leads.
- You might lose your customers due to the communication gap on your social network and emails.
- Your competitors might steal the show.
If you stop digital marketing during this disruptive and difficult time, you would start moving away from your customers and prospects.
So, no matter if your marketing budgets have shrunk, pausing digital marketing will be another disaster for your brand’s health and future.
Digital Marketing Approach During Coronavirus Crisis
Task your digital marketing team to do the necessary implementations from home. And if you are allowed to operate with limited staff, it would be wise to call up a few people in rotational shifts. Here are some of the digital marketing activities that can be done during the pandemic.
Connecting with Customers on Social Media
Not for brand promotions, of course. Use the power of social media to connect with your customers. Empathize with them, to listen to their experience, and help them in whatever manner you can. These small gestures help strengthen the bonding and trust between the brand and the customers.
Share updates on all your social networks on a daily basis, like WildLifeShowroom.com has been doing during the lockdown. But, remember, this is no time to aggressively promote your brand through your blogs. Check out how WildLifeshowroom is doing on Instagram:
So, you will need to be smart with your words and find ways to indirectly market your brand.
Make It Easier for Your Audience to Find You Online
One thing that hasn’t changed because of coronavirus is, people are still buying things online. Stats suggest that lockdown has triggered a rise in the percentage of customers buying online. Countries like Italy saw a massive 101% rise in online deliveries in the month of March, compared to the figures from March 2019.
To avoid missing even a single order, put your efforts to make your brand easy to find on search engines and social network.
Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Even though your marketing budget is tight, you could use PPC marketing to gain the attention of your audience and win an opportunity to sell. Effective search engine marketing strategies offer competitive advantage, along with increased traffic and sales.
Another reason why you should run paid online marketing campaigns is, the competition is down and because of that, the cost you generally need to pay per click has decreased by 6%.
Digital Marketing After COVID-19
Whatever comes goes away. This famous saying fits well for the coronavirus disease. Sooner or later, the virus is going to be a thing of past.
And when it is over, we all are going to notice the fastest market resurgence ever. Industries are going to resurface with a new energy.
With that hope, here is how your approach to digital marketing should be after the virus is over.
Monitor Everything
Use an advanced SEO tool to track and measure your position when things normalize post pandemic. As mentioned above, market dynamics have changed, so you might observe completely different scenarios for your website’s traffic and business.
Analyze the user behavior for your brand and for the industry. Notice the rise and fall of traffic on your website. Average out the leads and related data during the lockdown.
At the same time, closely monitor and compare your position with that of your competitors. You might also want to track how your competitors or industry giants are moving forward.
This all will help you reset your goals and prepare or modify your digital marketing strategies to overcome the losses you booked during the outbreak.
The Advertising Approach
The shift in user behavior has revolutionized the way digital and social work.
People are spending more time gulping down a heavy dose of video content online. About 76% of broadband households in US subscribed for at least one OTT service during the first quarter of 2020.
Timeline video ads are quite a thing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social networks also show video ads before and during timeline videos posted by channels and individuals. You can find space for your video ads here.
Video content or ad appeals more to the user. It gains more attention and allows you to deliver your message to your audience the right way in a more influential manner. You wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity here.
If you still haven’t started, here is a guide to learn more about video advertising now. Implement these strategies after the pandemic is over.
Return to E-commerce SEO Best Practices
When everything has returned to normal, it is time to restart the implementation of e-commerce SEO best practices. For quick recap, these include:
- Optimize the right keywords
- Perform competitor research and analysis
- Improve the functionality and UI/UX of e-commerce website homepage
- Streamline the overall structure of your website
- Check and fix the issues related to development and plug-ins
- Enhance the cart and checkout process
You can take example from TobaccoPipes.com, an online store that offers rare and branded cigars, pipes, and accessories. In May this year, they went for a revamp and solidified their keyword research. They have already geared up for the time when the coronavirus outbreak is over.
Apart from these, don’t forget to perfect your product pages and reducing the load speed of every page on your website.
Bottom Line
You will also need to review your budget allocation for digital marketing. In addition to that, give your product line a close look. Adjust the sequencing of your product lines, keeping the ones that are popular easy to locate and buy.
Before you reopen your e-commerce store to full potential after the lockdown if lifted, it is advisable to perform a deep analysis of your website to identify and fix development- and SEO- related errors. Fixing these issues will ensure that your digital marketing efforts yield.
Birbahadur Singh Kathayat is an entrepreneur, internet marketer and cofounder of Lbswebsoft, a digital marketing company, and has 12 years in digital Marketing experience and helping some of the biggest companies build their brands and keep their reputation while increasing sales in the process. He is a writer and author on Socialmediaweek, Semrush, e27 and other publications.
Digital marketing stock photo by Wright Studio/Shutterstock
