Digital Marketing While Navigating a Crisis

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Businesses are facing more significant challenges than ever before. The ones that successfully navigate the current landscape stand to carve out new market share as long as they weather the storm.

Considering Your Current Market

Specific industries, like local restaurants, are uniquely under pressure, and many of the individual businesses may not survive. The potential for fallout is so significant that companies that service this vertical may have to consider changing up.

It’s never easy to shift gears, but that may be the only way for specific sectors. If not switching entirely, it’s always reasonable to reconfigure current efforts to match the available opportunities. As one potential market wanes, others rise. Now’s a good time to pursue a plan to diversify your client base and potentially your product offerings.

If everything looks stable enough for your part of the world, then it’s still a good time to readjust marketing priorities. People’s habits are changing due to extended quarantines and other distractions. 

It’s worth considering current trends to think about what’s coming next. It’s also the right time to consider making significant improvements in areas where your ongoing marketing efforts are lacking.

What Do Your Stats Say About Your Digital Trends?

One incredible strong point of operating online is how easy it is to access accurate stats about your digital presence. Companies are well-served to master the fundamentals of Google Analytics to gain deep insights about their day to day numbers.

Of particular interest is dealing with trends. If revenue, traffic, and engagement are on the decline, the need to make improvements is obvious. 

• Google Analytics
• Matomo 

Running clean analytics reporting helps companies gain control and a keen understanding of their visitors. It’s always a wise idea to ensure that you’re counting primarily human visitors by filtering bots. That’s a complicated topic deserving of more information, but rest assured, the effort to clean up your log files yields extraordinary results.

Is Your Infrastructure up to the Task?

The proper infrastructure for your digital presence is always useful. High traffic websites need extra optimizations, but even lower impact destinations require constant monitoring and tweaking. 

If you’re in a growth phase, it’s worth exploring new technology and options. If your traffic is flatlined or declined, it’s worth looking for potential errors to fix and finding the most cost-effective hosting. 

Rely Heavily on Proven Tactics

It’s worth doubling down on current strategies that are paying off. If these tactics are not suffering from a downturn, then investing more money is a solid plan. After all, it’s ideal for rebalancing time, budgets, and resources to make up for lost business.

With chaos becoming prevalent in the business world, it’s worth remaining flexible. Some companies are planning on pivoting intensely to deal with changes in the operating environment. What they need to decide is how their current tools and infrastructure prepare them for what’s coming.

If your company needs to overhaul your marketing to approach new customers, it will entail adjusting many parameters. It’s not the most challenging task to accomplish, but significant changes generally require a strong commitment and deep pockets.

Which tactics are likely to continue to prove useful? The list of strategies that should continue to yield will include the following.

• A robust digital presence remains a cost-effective way to convert new prospects.
• A maintained email list is an ideal way to remain in contact with customers and prospects. Targeted emails help convert more people and increase revenues.
• Social media marketing remains a reliable source of small amounts of traffic and meaningful engagement. 
• Social advertising is a possibility, but only for organizations with well-developed and functional sales funnels.
• Direct selling may become a necessity for companies that lack the money for significant ad budgets. 
• Using a CRM is no longer optional, and companies that still don’t employ them to find customers and maintain relationships need to move quickly to begin their programs.

The good news about these strategies is that they’re affordable and proven to work across a broad range of industries. Companies that can’t invest vast sums into broad-ranging ad programs can still concentrate their efforts on their most vital niches.

The Global Economy Is Transforming Rapidly

A rapidly changing global business landscape means plenty of new opportunities are presenting themselves. Business people will have to remain open-minded about the possible direction their companies will take. For some, leadership is already facing hard facts. Others are in a better position in the near term, but must still consider potential pressures moving forward.

When In Doubt Go Local

It’s tough to compete with thousands of competing businesses. That’s why many companies tend to carve out niches in their precise geographic areas. It’s easier to build trust, costs less, and delivers direct conversions faster than alternatives.

Focusing on local is easy thanks to the use of Google My Business Pages as a centralized data hub. Google uses information from those listings to populate its maps and search engine results pages. That helps people who are actively searching for nearby businesses find yours. 

Local search combines several elements to succeed. 

• The basic SEO must meet modern standards and include pertinent keywords.
• The website must have some authority that derives from incoming backlinks, especially related ones.
• The corporate reputation must be solid with at least some excellent reviews, preferably recently.

These areas require commitment and constant tweaking to yield optimal results. Businesses that focus on improving their local SEO and their social media marketing campaigns can always find new clients. The downside is that the process is tedious and time-consuming. Worse, every competitor tends to do similar things, so the strategy is a constant grind.

It helps to be good at the basics matters for local placement. It might not always be easy to gain traffic from local people, but they are people who are actively searching for vendors. That means the high conversion rate will offset the extra work to find them.

Check All the Right Boxes!

To help people find your business online, be as accurate as possible with every aspect of your information. You may decide to use a reporting service to keep all of your data in line. That’s a more straightforward solution than managing and maintaining profiles across the web.

Either way, know that search engines and customers truly appreciate accurate information. Nobody wants to show up looking for a particular business during scheduled business hours to find out that instead, they’re closed!

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