How to Adapt Your Digital Marketing Strategy in Uncertain Times

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COVID-19 may have one of the biggest impacts on businesses and individuals in our lifetime and there is so much negativity out there at the moment.

At Digital Clarity, we care about you, our employees, friends, peers and clients. We want to make sure that in these uncertain times, there are some positives and ways to help your business in this extremely difficult situation.

We are all in this together. So let’s look at some key things we can be thinking about in order to adapt to this current climate.

1. Keep Safe

The number one thing is to make sure we are following the recommendations to keep ourselves, our friends and our family safe and healthy, as tough as that may seem sometimes. We really don’t have much choice at the moment other than to adapt to the way we work as the government adjusts their recommendations to manage this virus.

Many business owners, entrepreneurs and market leaders may be feeling overwhelmed right now. Our wings have been clipped and we are being told we can’t do what we do best, which is normally getting out there, meeting and greeting new people and building our brand and reputation. However, turning that on its head, it’s through the tough times when we can each come into our own. We can focus to keep ourselves and our family healthy whilst being entrepreneurial at the same time.

For every situation, there are a number of opportunities as well as threats. So it is important to take a step back and review your business and identify where the threats are and where the opportunities are.

2. Review

All businesses are different, so this really requires you to look closely at your own business and review what you have been offering based on the needs of your clients and what their needs now are.

A number of questions you can ask:

  1. Have your clients/customers’ needs changed? If so, identify what they are now.
  2. How can you adjust your product, service, solution or messaging in order to address those new needs? It may be possible that you can’t, in which case note this down as well.
  3. Are these new needs short term or long term? Depending on the answer, the solution may differ.

Let’s look at one example:

A Recruitment Agency Business

Their client needs –

  1. If many people are now working remotely, will the clients still be hiring?
  2. With a shut down of certain industries, will redundancies be made and hence fewer clients or a loss of current clients for your business?
  3. Are staff being signed off sick?
  4. Lack of work from home policies, and a lack of trust that employees are working from home effectively
  5. Cybersecurity concerns

Opportunities and threats –

  1. Speak to your clients, understand the challenges, understand the market changes for them and what their new issues might be
  2. Empathise and understand that you may not be able to help everyone and you may lose business from some clients or customers
  3. Can you offer virtual interviews, or provide temporary candidate placements of remote working staff to cover for sick employees?
  4. Can you support or offer consultancy to businesses around work from home policies?
  5. Do you have partners or contacts to refer to where clients require cybersecurity or IT support?

3. Strategise

Once you have drilled into the points above, you should have identified some opportunities and some threats. These now need to be mapped into a tangible plan to support what you have identified.

Search:

If you are currently running search marketing ads on Google or Microsoft which are promoting business as usual – these will likely need reviewing. Using your opportunities and threats from step 1, identify what your messaging could be in order to encompass these.

Review the keywords you are appearing for, are you matching to the incorrect keywords or are there new keywords which are being searched for now which were previously not even on your radar.

In the example of the recruitment business, it may be that temp roles have become your main opportunity. Therefore, you may want to change the focus of your keywords to temp related or remote working candidate hire, temp candidates to work from home, and so on.

Display:

If your business can offer a unique solution to some of the current challenges which have arisen, then it is as important to maintain exposure as it was before. Brand awareness and educating people about your business, must remain key.

For example, you may offer a technology to help teams collaborate whilst working remotely, a project management tool or video conferencing solution. You may see a spike in impressions and clicks within these markets – so monitor this carefully and make sure you set budgets accordingly.

If you are unsure of the online impact to your business then take a look at your website visitor numbers against the impression share to regularly monitor any peaks or troughs on a daily basis.

This needs to be applied across all your digital assets; your website, your display advertising, social media and your email strategy.

4. Adapt

No one currently knows how long businesses will be working remotely, or what the future holds from day to day let alone month to month. Therefore it is important to be flexible.

Monitor the current market, track the results via your website analytics and lead management systems and adapt with the changes. You may identify new opportunities or you may find the changes to your messaging are not resonating with the audience.

If your business was previously reliant on physically being somewhere, how can you make a change to digital? Think about other possibilities; digital learning, teaching, viewing, selling, buying and so on.

You need to be flexible but also understand what you are setting out to achieve with each change.

Try setting a hypothesis, what is your theory on what is likely to happen based on the changes? Then test one change at a time. Measure and report on the result. Did it meet your hypothesis? If not, what are the likely reasons it didn’t? If it did, what are the next tests to continually develop and improve performance?

When everything is going into lockdown and people within businesses are working remotely, your digital assets may become a more important reliance than anyone imagined.

It’s going to be a rollercoaster ride, there will be ups and downs and plenty of new challenges which you may not have come up against before. Keep safe, keep proactive and keep adapting.

Good luck and remember, we will get through this. If you would like more information, please get in touch.

 

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