With the Coronavirus lockdown in full force, businesses are having to work harder – and smarter – in order to maintain their momentum. All businesses need to revisit their marketing plans and think about how their strategies should adapt.
1. Think about existing customers
It’s easier to retain your customer base than it is to acquire new customers. Invest in marketing automation to enjoy the benefits of effective, easy and low-cost methods of customer engagement. Use it to send out targeted and personalised messages to your customers, with relevant, useful and contextually-valuable information that offers them something they want to hear. Keep in touch with your customers through all of the digital channels that they use, from your website to your social media channels. By automating the delivery and scheduling of these tasks, you will find that it becomes easier to use your human talent for more strategic activity.
2. Be visible
This is the time to build brand awareness and visibility, so invest in methods that drive visitors to your website. Work on your SEO and consider paid online advertising which directs customers to the right landing pages which have been optimised for conversions. Again, make sure that you are creating high-quality content so that customers are likely to engage with your brand and share your content.
3.Drive conversions
Focus on your user journeys to optimise your conversion rate. Look for small changes that you can make to keep bettering the user experience. This will turn visitors into customers. Make sure your website is quick to respond, smooth to travel through and intuitive. Consider applying AI in the form of chatbots throughout your website where you know that the bounce rate will be high. Chatbots are proven to help engage visitors where they might otherwise bounce to a competitor or simply give up on their search. The chatbot will use machine learning to give common answers to queries, and the system can link to a human agent during working hours and when questions are more complex.
4. Measure everything that you do
Without measurement, it’s all too easy to see your marketing budget disappear down the drain. Measure everything that you do for better results – sales, generated leads, referrals and upsells. Have relevant and appropriate key performance indicators in place to measure the right things. Check that Google Analytics has been set up properly and is being used as it should. Do you have goals in place? Are you measuring the returns on your social media? Use these questions to make the best use of your budget in a challenging time.
5. Test
In the same way that you should be measuring everything that you do for more informed decision-making, it also makes sense to test your activities, especially in the digital sphere. Carry out regular testing on your online adverts, website copy, email campaigns and social media engagement strategies to make sure that they work as they should and are delivering the experience that your customers need.
Can you honestly say that you are using the current period to focus on these fundamentals? By doing so, you will shore up your marketing efforts to be even more impactful once the current period of lockdown finishes and the economy begins to rebound once again.
