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3 Marketing Actions Your Business Can Take During the Pandemic

23rd April 2020

#Marketing

If your business is currently pivoting or innovating (or even if you're not) it’s about time to reassess your marketing strategy in light of the pandemic.

If you’re one of the many business owners who are currently pivoting or innovating your service proposition (or even if you’re definitely not) it’s about time to reassess your marketing strategy in light of the pandemic.

If your business has been affected in any way, and let’s face it most of us have, it can feel tough to know where to start with your marketing. But there are valuable actions you can take that’ll put you in good stead now, and when things do start to return to normal.

Here are 3 marketing actions you can take right now.

1. Review your website’s SEO

Right now, online marketing is the main avenue for potential customers to find you.  So if you’re thinking about how to prepare your business for the future, reviewing your website’s SEO should be up there. Especially when offline marketing like face-to-face networking is currently feeling like a very distant memory!

Technical SEO

Ensuring your website is technically sound for SEO is super important. It allows Google and other search engines to get the info they need to put your website in front of those searching for what you’re selling.

Tools like Pingdom and Google Pagespeed Insights can help with identifying technical improvements you need to make to your website. If you can’t complete the to-do list yourself, at least you’ll have it to give to someone who can!

Keyword research

We’d also recommend doing some keyword research to make sure your current content includes the keywords you want to rank for in Google. This will help your potential customers find you in the right place, at the right time online.

SEO content plan

While you’re researching for your current content, note down related keywords. You can use these to plan more great content! Because it never hurts to have lots of interesting content in the locker ready to publish when things get busier again.

Remember: It’s important to get your keywords into your content but it’s more important to write engaging content that your audience wants to read.

Get more tips on improving your website’s SEO in this blog.

2. Reassess your marketing plans

A lot of us are doing business differently with the current restrictions, so it makes perfect sense that marketing plans should adapt too.

According to research by MarketingWeek, “the vast majority of consumers do not think brands need to stop advertising during the Covid-19 outbreak, although they do expect companies to think about their tone and messaging, and communicate around values.”

So basically people want to hear from you but need you to be sensitive to the current situation. Common sense really!

At such an unusual time, it can be hard to know what to do but here are a few pointers to help you adapt your marketing plan.

Adapt your current marketing initiatives

First of all, adapting doesn’t mean starting from scratch.

Your marketing plan may have involved putting on events for current and prospective clients. With that out of the window, what’s your plan B? Can you do a webinar or other online event instead?

Look at your plans and see how they can be updated to add more value in the current climate.

Use social media

We don’t have the stats to back it up but we’re sure social media use has gone through the roof during lockdown. As well as keeping in touch with friends, it’s the perfect way to communicate with customers whilst you’re not able to do it in person.

So how can you up your game on social media? Again, look to what you were planning before this all happened and find the value in it now. You can still get your message out there – it might just be slightly different to what you’d planned!

We wrote this blog a little while back on how to adapt your social media content. It has some useful tips to help you get it right.

Check on your marketing strategy

On a broader level, reassess your overall strategy. It’s good to look to the future and set goals – and you might need to adapt the goals you’d already set in light of the current situation.

There’s no shame in it, It just means you’ll have your best foot forward when things do return to normal – whatever that’s going to look like.

For more on planning for business growth read this blog.

 3. Dig into your analytics

Checking your analytics regularly is so important, but can often get pushed to the bottom of the pile when things get busy. So what better time to get analytical?

Analytics can help you to implement both of the tips we’ve just discussed, and provide valuable insight into the content that your audience enjoys.

Whilst every business is different, lockdown could well be the perfect opportunity to mix things up and try something new, and there’s only one way to find out how well it worked… analytics! It’s your new best friend.

This blog has 6 key things Google analytics can tell you about your website, then this one lets you know how you can use this data to make better marketing decisions.

Let us know how you get on!

Let’s chat

We’re always up for a chat about how you can get the most out of your marketing, and we’re here to help if you need a sounding board to get you through this strange time. Send us a quick email or give us a call on 0191 691 1293.