The past weeks have turned the lives of most people upside down. It is not an easy time for businesses. Some are closing down for indefinite time, some are still working, even if remotely, but the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak is felt by everyone.
In this ‘quarantine’ situation, companies start to question all the tasks/ investments they are making, trying to figure out what is essential and what is useless or can be cancelled for now. So, what about digital marketing?
If you ask us if your company – that continues to labour, even with reduced volumes and that has the possibility to carry on working on digital marketing as well – should do it, we say “by all means, do it”. This pandemic is not in any way a reason to stop it; but yes, it is time to get smarter about it. Let us give you some ideas on what can still be done during these challenging ‘quarantine times’:
- Take a look at your website.
This is the perfect moment to make some ‘house cleaning’. Is your website on WordPress? Then, it’s probably time to finally update all those plugins and themes that you’ve been postponing for some time now. If your website has a comments’ functionality, take a moment to answer all those your website visitors have left you.
Does your website still have pages of goods you are no longer selling? Did you find any broken links? This is the right time for you to dedicate yourself to doing some website maintenance.
- Online advertising.
If you have the budget to continue running ads during the quarantine times, then definitely do so. You may reduce the overall budget, but do not stop. Again, just get smarter on how you go about it:
- Temporarily delete from your targeting the geographic areas that are being more affected by the situation (Italy, for instance). If you are running Google Ads, you may keep these areas in your targeting, but create negative bid adjustments for them. This way, you do not ‘disappear’ in those areas, but rather reduce the investment.
- If you have some campaigns dedicated to your physical store and others dedicated to your e-commerce website, try pausing the physical store ones and direct the ‘freed-up’ budget to the e-commerce campaigns. Let your customers know, that you can still help them even if they stay home in voluntary isolation or mandatory quarantine.
- If you do not sell online and right now you don’t have any actual business going on, you can still use some of the budget you’ve already assigned to your online advertising. Try to invest in brand awareness campaigns. Those campaigns are not designed for immediate purchases, but rather to make users consider your company the next time they are going to need your products or services, so it is the perfect time for this kind of advertising.
- Social Media.
Here everything is simple. Do not stop posting! Right now most people have much more time to scroll down on Social Media, and at this point, as most of the feed is dedicated to the virus’ news, anything that is different will immediately catch their attention. Keep creating useful posts for your audience; it will make them even more attached to your brand in the long run.
- New content creation.
Here the situation is the same as with Social Media. People have now more time to read, so create that article/ post/ new text for your homepage, that you’ve been meaning to write for some months, and then promote it a little through said social media. You might be pleasantly surprised by the reach it may get.
All in all, the main thing is to stay safe and not to panic. Invest in your brand now, implement long-term strategies. And remember that when most companies go into pause mode, the competition goes down. At the same time, the general public reads and sees ‘things’ more. To us, this sounds like an opportunity!
This crisis will sooner or later pass (and that is a fact), so why not try to make your audience a little ‘warmer’ now, so that when things get back to normal and the world stabilises, you can approach them with conversion-orientated campaigns that have a greater chance for success?
If you have any more ideas and strategies for this period, feel free to share them with us using the contact form bellow, and we will be happy to do some brainstorming with you!
