Why now isn’t the time to completely stop your online marketing

As the economy takes a huge hit during the pandemic, businesses are taking steps to reduce their expenditure. If your business has a physical location as well as a website, having to close the physical location will have had a huge impact on your business finances. However keeping your website and communication running, even on a reduced budget can help you keep going in these uncertain times, with work that can be done in house or outsourced.

In the kind of situations we find ourselves in at the moment it can be tempting to just switch everything off or stop all activities to save money, however, it’s worthwhile to look at activities you can do which either don’t cost anything or can be done in a cost-effective way. Look at what capacity you have and ‘think outside the box.’

SEO Ecommerce

Content Audit

Do all your products, categories & subcategories have content? If not then start with basic keyword research, you can do this by looking in Search Console to see what other keywords rank for that page and writing content to suit. It’s important to make sure your content is relevant, cohesive and well written and not just packed with keyword and it needs to be beneficial to the user.

Title Tags

Title tags are an HTML element which is used to specify the title of your web page. These tags are your sales pitch, this is what shows in Google when some searches a particular word or phrase. Ask yourself: “Are your title tags optimised as much as they can be?” Such as: “widgets: Widget Store” these can really be expanded.

Meta Descriptions

A meta description is a snippet which summarises page content in search engines and shows when a searched-for phrase shows within the description. Meta description snippets are up to 155 characters and are an HTML tag and important for on-page SEO, especial for your main and product pages. Whilst not a necessity, it’s probably best to have these for all none product level pages too.

Blog

Have you got a blog and not shown it some love for months or maybe even years, start adding content to it now. It can be one of the jobs when you are busy that’s easy to put off, however, a blog can help boost your SEO if you post relevant content. It’s not a case of adding content for content’s sake but looking at what you can provide for others. If your website provides relevant content, such as being able to answer customers questions, provide examples and case studies and share helpful guides this is what can help boost your SEO.

Digital Media Marketing & PR

PR

Although cost constraints can make it harder to keep paying for PR and other marketing activities, if you have an important, relevant message to share, depending on your business circumstances these activities could be a cost-effective strategy. You don’t want people to forget your brand, but at the same time, you don’t want to look like you’re capitalising on the current situation.

Can your business help others? If so this is a good message to share. Journalists are on the lookout or a variety of opportunities which can show how we can help each other and how business can help. Twitter is the best place to keep on top of this with #journorequest #prrequest.

Plan ahead, this will come to an end, look to the future, what are you going to want to start with when everything starts to get back to normal. What will your customers and potential new customers want to know and what will they want to see?

Email Marketing

This is an important customer focussed channel, as many businesses have been using this to let their customers, past and present, know what’s actually going on with the business. It can be timely to use this to ensure your customers are up-to-date with what your business is currently able to provide. Are you still open online? Do customers need to be prepared to wait a bit longer for deliveries, will some products be unavailable or restricted to a certain number bought? All this can be easily conveyed in email.

Social Media

The first thing to do is to pause and reconsider your social media plans and your target goals. The digital environment is most likely a different environment than when you set them. Look at what is more likely to be achievable in this time, such as online sales figures instead of store visits. Review content planned, is it appropriate in the current climate and would the messages be taken well?

Look at your platforms and see if you need to be promoting on all of them, are some working better than others? For example, are many of your existing customers following you on one channel more than another, look at supporting them, by switching your goals to customer retention. Work on your social media marketing by looking at what you can do for others and what messages you spread, can you add motivating or supportive, helpful content?

With the potential of less content creation, posting and promotional work, use your time well. Look at those more analytical social media tasks you may have put off, such as an audit of your accounts and use this information to plan your re-start. Although we don’t know how long yet we may be restricted movement and how long it will be before things get back to normal, we can still plan what to do when that happens:

How are you going to get the business presence back to what it was, what could your most important goals be and messages you want to send out. Although you may not exactly know what your goals and targets are, maybe you can put something in place so you can get back up and running as seamlessly as you can.

What else can you do?

If it’s especially quiet, take the time to look at your branding, what updates or changes can you make now, what could you plan in for the future when you’re back up and running again? What are you missing from your current marketing strategies, if you’re unsure and just want a different set of eyes to look over your website, or want a sounding off-board as to what you can do to weather this storm we are here for you. So please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Images

Photo by Nikita Kachanovsky

Photo by Benjamin Dada

Photo by Clark Tibbs

Photo by Allie Smith