#1: If you can, Invest In Your Marketing
I know how that sounds coming from a digital marketing company. We understand that not all businesses still have money to put into ad campaigns or the staff/time to dedicate to writing content. Many businesses are not able to invest in marketing during these tough times due to decreased revenues. This means that the ad spaces won’t be crowded, blogs will remain silent, social media spaces won’t be too busy. This leaves the door wide open for your business to swoop in and gain a competitive advantage for the long term. It will make it easier to “restart” if you never fully stop.
With people spending more time online, this is not the time to go silent. Stay active and connect with your audience – share stories, post useful resources, host live sessions, write helpful blog posts… Find a way to create connections with your audience and strengthen relationships. If you have limited resources try automating some tasks to save you time. Dedicate a day or two creating blog posts and social media posts, schedule them and they will post automatically for the new few weeks.
#2: Audit Your Marketing Budget
The business landscape has changed. Travel is basically canceled. Retail stores are closed. Conferences, events, and tradeshows are canceled. With the quarantine, people are spending more time online and consuming more media.
It’s time to rethink your marketing budget and strategy and adapt to this COVID-19 new behaviour reality.
Some of our clients have increased their online ad spend because they saved money by not going to tradeshows and conferences. Paid ads are also cheaper now in some industries because competitors have stopped advertising and are not fighting you for that top spot during the ad auction.
Some clients have paused their online spend altogether and focused on SEO and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) instead. This is a great time to boost your SEO and internal content to gain those long term competitive advantages. Improving your conversion rate now will have a lasting effect and will allow you to rebound faster.
There is no “one size fits all” strategy. It has to be customized based on your industry, target audience, medium and long term goals. Be flexible, look at where your audience currently is and go there.
#3: Invest in live chat
Live chat can be very useful whether you are now operating a remote workforce, or whether you were forced to layoff some employees and now have reduced capacity.
- With staff working from home, a live chat is a great way to connect staff and your target audience.
- With reduced staff, a chatbot can be very useful to answer frequently asked questions using Artificial intelligence.
Some chatbots are very simple to set up. Others are very complicated. If you are interested in setting up a chatbot for your site, let us know and we would be happy to point you in the right direction. We’ve done all the research so you don’t have to.
Plus you can master the chatbot when your volume is reduced and use the time it will save you when things get busy again.
#4: Pivot
It’s time to reinvent yourself and pivot to serve your audience or change your audience. Health Care services like doctors, physiotherapists, mental health workers on now doing online appointments instead of in-person.
Restaurants have changed their services to delivery only and are getting creative. Retail stores are focusing on e-commerce to make up for the foot traffic lost.
One of our clients “Thoughtfarmer” provides intranet services and has focused its content on remote workforce and business continuity as well as offered their software for free for 3 months to help businesses in need.
Now is the time to pivot and reinvent what your future looks like because the “old” normal is gone. The future is now.
#5: Help others
This is the time to forge relationships and help each other out. Whether you can help your clients, your community, essential workers, it doesn’t really matter. Your business’ image will come out stronger on the other side of this crisis. You will have a tighter relationship with your clients, suppliers, the community around you or anyone you were able to help during this time.
There has been a huge increase in philanthropy and dollar or product donations from a lot of businesses which is nice to see in a time of crisis. At 1UP, we are donating our time and offering free digital marketing webinars to assist businesses during this downtime.
So take a minute and ask yourself: who could I help tomorrow?
#6: Prepare for the rebound
This crisis will be very damaging and might last a while. However, like every crisis, it has to end at some point. Take advantage of this downtime to make a plan for when the economy restarts and hit the ground running. Don’t spend the first couple of weeks/months getting your affairs back in order. Have a detailed step by step plan ready to be enforced and obviously, implement as much as you can as soon as you can. Prepare ad campaigns around “back in business” promotions, “after COVID events” etc…get busy planning now so you can get busy doing when it kickstarts again.
If you are interested in scheduling a free digital marketing consultation, please contact us and we will do our best to get to everyone: