“If you were given the opportunity to have your competition go to sleep and stop strategizing, producing and delivering their marketing message to your potential customers, would you take advantage of it? That opportunity is now. Take advantage of it, or when this is over, don’t be surprised to find yourself behind.”
Nathan Yerian – President of Adhere Creative
In the midst of COVID-19, we find ourselves in a unique position filled with challenges, uncertainties, and opportunities. As we practice social distancing for the greater good, we’ve been quarantining everything and, unfortunately in some cases, our marketing activities. With time to pivot from daily tasks, this is the perfect opportunity to get ahead of the competition by positioning your marketing to hit the ground running once the quarantine is lifted.
Here are some ideas to get you started.
Create a New Turnkey Marketing Campaign
To stay ahead of the competition, you can build a new marketing campaign during your time at home. Think strategically by addressing the pain points your buyer personas are dealing with during this time. If you need help with the structure of your campaign you can find a great template here in this blog.
To begin, you’ll want to brainstorm a concept for success. You can do this by considering the pain points of your target audience and then positioning your product or service as the answer to overcoming said pain points. Your product or service is the guide to success for your campaign and your customers. As you brainstorm, this should be at the forefront of your mind. The customer and their issues are at the center of your messaging and you are the solution.
Concept Pro Tip
Use loglines to help organize your ideas to fit your buyer personas. A logline is a brief summary (usually one sentence) of a story that states the central conflict, often providing both a synopsis of the story’s plot and an emotional “hook” to stimulate interest. At the center of every successful marketing campaign is a relevant story. Here is a marketing logline template and more information to get you started.”
After you have a campaign concept ironed out the next step is to develop action items to execute on the concept. You need novel content and a promotional vehicle to share your message to your customers. As you decide what the content is going to be we recommend focusing on video content as it is the gold standard for marketing in 2020. Once you decide on the content, break out how you are going to complete it with step-by-step action items that you can cross off a list as you go.
Now that you have the concept and the content items completed, you must decide how you’re going to deliver the content to your target audience. This can be done in several ways, and utilizing multiple channels to spread the message is the way to go. Email, paid ads, social media, and blogs are just a few ways you can share your content. Build your campaign out as a draft so that when this passes all you have to do is flip a switch and you are live.
Having a novel and relevant marketing campaign launch during this crazy time will show your customers that you made it through the storm and will build confidence in your brand. Getting back to business as usual will be very important in the coming weeks and you want to be one step ahead of your competition. Continuing to market yourself will give that perception to your customers.
Data review and analysis
Another great opportunity during the quarantine period is to take a deeper dive into your data. Oftentimes we’re so busy working through our daily tasks that we don’t take the appropriate time to look into our data and find ways to improve. There is much to be learned from this kind of analysis, and doing so can help find holes in your marketing as well as show you what to focus on. Here are a few ideas for reviewing your data.
Review Your Google Analytics
- Identify your top performing traffic sources and look for patterns. You can use this information to build congruent content that supports this traffic channel.
- Review your bounce rate by source and look at your best content if you have a blog or many site pages. This will help you see where you are bleeding engagement on your site and should give you ideas on how to fix it. Remember, you want to keep your traffic as engaged as possible.
- Double check to make sure you have set up your goals correctly so that you are tracking your conversions. Oftentimes conversions are not reported because the goals in Google Analytics are set correctly. Take time to review this so that when things get back to normal you are seeing correct data.
Analytics Pro Tip
Look at referral traffic specifically – if your traffic has dropped it might help to see if there’s a referral who’s still producing traffic.For example, a brick and mortar business might see that their Yelp referral traffic still looks strong, so they should go optimize and update their Yelp account.”
Optimize your Google My Business Account
- Google My Business is a must-have if you want to drive search results to your business. It’s how Google Maps showcases businesses and the primary way customers and leave and read reviews.
- Make sure you verify your business, add correct business information, and include pictures of your business on your account.
- Also, you can use this platform to post direct communications with potential customers. For example, if you have a business that is open but only for pick up, you can add a message directly to your Google My Business account so that those who find your business in Google Maps will also get your message. It’s a great way to communicate with your customers.
Review organic keyword rankings
- Reviewing your keyword rankings will help you to increase your organic traffic and see where you are falling short. We use SEMrush for our keyword audits and recommend that or MOZ for your review.
- By identifying which keywords you are ranking for, you can build content to support that and stay on top of your competition.
- You can also use this information to improve your ranking on other target keywords that are not performing as well. You simply take the information from the audit and build a SEO strategy with underperforming keywords. Here is a high level guide to SEO if you haven’t done it before.
Website optimization
Google recently announced that they are indexing websites for mobile first. This means that your website must be built to be consumed on mobile devices as a priority over desktop. This is a major shift and speaks volumes about the way we are consuming online content through our mobile devices.
Because of this shift in priority, Google will penalize websites that are not built for mobile, which will damage your SEO and organic traffic volume. You can take advantage of this downtime by reviewing your website and making needed improvements to stay in front of the herd.
Here are a few tips to improve your website during the quarantine.
- Look into building your website with a mobile first approach.
- Use Google Page Speed Insights to learn what improvements each page of your site needs.
- Use the keyword audit above to update your SEO strategy on your website pages. This will improve your keyword rankings and your organic traffic.
Website Pro Tip
Overhauling your entire site is a HUGE undertaking, instead of jumping off into the deep end, consider taking it on one piece at a time starting with your Landing / Conversion Pages. Using Google Page Speed Insights will let you know exactly what you need to do to optimize each page.
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