Digital Marketing Strategies During COVID-19
The COVID-19 outbreak is having a phenomenal impact on countries and businesses all around the world. As a business owner, it is becoming more of a priority to explore all marketing options available to your business to see you through the coming months.In such a precarious economic climate the worst thing you could do is to cease all promotional efforts out of fear and panic. Keeping the momentum of your search engine marketing can, in fact, help keep revenue coming in which is imperative amidst the current uncertainty.
Here are some digital strategies which can help you and your business.
1. Update your Google My Business
Whether your business is open or closed during this time, it is critical that you communicate this to your customers by updating your Google My Business profile. Previously, if a business was marked as temporarily closed, it would lose it’s appearance in the Google results. Google has changed it’s views on this under the current environment and any businesses changed to temporarily closed will still appear in maps. You can change your status from the Google My Business dashboard.Google is recommending that people update their Google My Business profiles during this time especially if they are impacted by Covid-19.
Here are our recommendations:
- Update the opening hours on your profile
- Add a post explaining how your business is affected by Covid-19
- Change your status to temporarily closed if relevant
2. Home in on Customer Service and Reputation Management
Brands such as Facebook are creating content hubs to keep users in the know. What steps can you take? Small to medium businesses can update their blogs to create content relevant to their market or even as a way of updating their customers to the measures being taken within their business.It’s an opportune time to provide customers with informational content. Reassuring customers and letting them know what’s happening to help them will enhance customer trust in your brand.
3. Answer FAQs
Many people are flocking to Google for information right now. Your website should answer questions that searches are asking – whether that’s to find out if you are open or if you are stocking certain products.By using these types of pages, and adding FAQ schema to these pages, you have an opportunity to appear higher in the Google listings which can subsequently increase your traffic and click through rate.
4. Create a Google Ads Campaign
As we’ve mentioned, it’s extremely important right now to let your customers know if you are trading or not. If you feel you are not getting the message across adequately, one way to do this is to create a Google Ads campaign. This is the ideal way to target customers who are intending to buy quickly.Some products and services will, inevitably, drop in demand over the coming months. Now is the ideal time to use online ads to push discounts and endorse the efforts of your sales team. Depending on your product or service, you may need to remain mindful of a potential disruption to stock and delivery.
5. Use Social Media
In the same way as using Google My Business can keep customers up to date, social media is another way to stay in touch with customers. You can compose posts to advise whether you are open or not, whether you can take orders currently, or simply if you and your employees are safe. Generally, just online activity is encouraged.Obviously this is a challenging time, but the long term effects on your business should be considered if you decide to stop all marketing efforts.
We encourage you to stay active and involved online, answer any questions from customers and let them know that you are still there. This too shall pass.
Published on Saturday, 11 April 2020 under Google My Business, Online Marketing.
