Six Tips for Marketing during a Pandemic
The Covid-19 crisis has caused a significant impact on businesses in every industry. Budgets are being slashed and cuts are happening across the board, making it difficult for a business to successfully market their products and services. With that in mind, we have put together 6 practical tips you can put into effect for your business, in-house, today.
1. Social Media
Social media is the place to be right now. Be it trying to find the latest news on the coronavirus situation to people using social media to connect with their friends and family, everyone is spending more time online. Therefore, it’s important to ensure your business has a presence in the digital space.
Continue to be active
Post regularly for your business, consider the content you are publishing and ensure the content is relevant for the current climate. Do not try to capitalise on the pandemic – it’s not a good look!
Build Trust
Use this time to highlight how you can help your customer and community. By doing so, you help them to trust you and the services you provide. Building trust is one of the top rules in marketing and will often lead to repeat business.
Address Concerns
Listen to your customers’ concerns and address the issues or questions arising from this difficult time. Stay positive in your messaging, but don’t be naïve. If the restrictions from the pandemic have had any kind of effect on the way you deliver your products and services, absolutely communicate these changes to your customers, along with the steps your business is taking to help keep them safe.
Facebook Creator Studio
The Facebook Creator Studio is a free tool that you can use to schedule posts in advance. With this platform, you can schedule posts to go up during optimum times for your target audience (such as between 7 – 9pm) so you won’t have to manually post relevant social media posts after-hours.
2. Marketing Mix
Now is the time to see if you need to reconfigure your marketing mix. With goalposts shifting every few days, we believe it’s important to reassess priorities on a day to day basis. Take a look at where your marketing budget funds are being invested and consider if they need to be reallocated.
For example, if you have funds allocated to attending tradeshows consider redirecting these funds to invest in digital platforms. Tradeshows are unlikely to proceed in this climate, therefore investing your funds into where your target audience are spending their time (such as social media and google) would get you more bang for your buck.
3. Website
Now is the time to look at your websites and see if there is any outdated information that needs to be refreshed. Do you have new opening hours due to the pandemic? Are there extra measures your business will be taking? Do you have any new imagery you can publish? Review your website and update any appropriate information.
You might even find you will need to add an entire Covid-19 page to your website with any relevant information and how the restrictions might be affecting your business.
If your business is retail based but does not provide online shopping, now is the time to take it online. Invest the time now to get e-commerce set up, there are a number of user-friendly platforms available, such as Shopify and WordPress. Australia Post numbers have doubled during the pandemic, showing how valuable online shopping can be for a retail business.
4. Client Retention
Continue to communicate with your client base and look after them as they are your biggest asset!
Latest research suggests that 92% of potential new customers will trust a peer recommendation over most forms of advertising. Make use of social media and email marketing to connect with your clientele, ask them how they are going and how you can help them out.
Also, don’t be afraid to ask for reviews. 71% of customers will research a business online before they even make contact, often using digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google Reviews.
5. Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a valuable tactic for your business. Being low cost and requiring very little effort, it is a great return of investment.
Delivered straight to the recipient’s inbox, this form of marketing is effective in driving conversion rates to increase sales. The average open rate for email marketing is 20% which is much higher than the 3% organic reach social media achieves.
When sending out email marketing, ensure:
Your branding is consistent through the message
You have a catchy subject line to capture the attention of your audience
You have a clear call to action
You segment your database relevant to the message you’re sending out
Make sure the information you are sending out is valuable. If your business has had to make changes due to Covid-19, definitely communicate this to your database, but if its business as usual there is no point in sending an email out and wasting peoples time. The recipient will be less likely to open your email next time!
6. Plan Ahead
Take a consistent, integrated approach to your marketing. If your business does not have a marketing strategy in place, invest some time into developing one now.
Learn to understand your target audience, their needs and challenges so you can strategically connect and engage with them.
Try and identify a variety of ‘what if’ scenarios and plan how you can adapt your business in each different situation. Have a Plan A, Plan B and a Plan C. If you plan ahead, you will be one step ahead of your competition.
We hope we’ve given you some useful and practical tips that you can implement for your business. As always if you need any help, please drop us a line. We’re all in this together and there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.