How To Maintain, Even Grow Your Business Digitally After A Pandemic in 2021

 The COVID-19 outbreak has made many businesses shut down
or at least operate from home, forcing them to rework their Internet marketing strategies among many other things. The Young Presidents’ Organization’s (YPO) survey indicated that 82% of business leaders are expecting significant declines in revenues over the course of the next six months. These figures look bleak. How, then, does a business owner channel his digital marketing spend intelligently and stay afloat during these hard times?

Build short-term and long-term Marketing strategies:

We don’t know how long this pandemic will last. Therefore, you need to form:

• Short-term strategies to stay visible and relevant during this hard time. This is a great opportunity to focus on building a connection with your customer and doing some brand building.

•  Long-term strategies to rebound from a business slump and bring back lost customers.

            It doesn’t matter whether you’re a manufacturing business or a service provider business         

            Your strategies would be loosely based on the same principle.

Short term strategies

1.Revisit your keywords and market research

Times have changed and so have keyword researches. It comes as no surprise that keywords like “online medicines” and “video conferencing” have skyrocketed. Even if your business has nothing to do with these, take heart.

For example, if you’re a gym owner your keyword search may just have to change from “best gym in Hyderabad” to “best ab workouts and diet plans”. Put out your workout videos on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. You could do aggressive SEO, to make sure your video ranked high and gets maximum traffic. You could support this with ads and posts on social media.

Again, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in – there are ways to work around how you can remain visible online.

2.Focus on reduced Cost per clicks(CPCs)

If you have some funds to spare on digital marketing efforts, use them to run paid ads. Because of the economic crisis, most companies are now cutting costs, especially from their marketing budget. This is why paid ads are becoming less competitive and are more affordable.

Using google ads will help you advertise your business more effectively to a large audience in a small budget and more quickly. Just ensure that you’re targeting the right audience and there’s no spill-over.

3.Offer free or paid-for online services:

If you’re in the education sector, you can offer free tutorials via Skype, Zoom, or Google Hangouts.

Even if you’re a fitness service provider or therapist, you can take sessions with your customers online. This is a great way to showcase your goodwill and keep your customers happy. Ask your channel subscribers to sign-up for premium content by paying online. Even if they don’t pay for your videos you have a better chance of them buying your membership/services when things do get back to normal.

If you’re in Banking & Finance, you could offer quality advice on financial management in these trying times. You could generate meaningful content in the form of videos, blog posts and quora answers.

4.Organize a Webinar or an Event Online

Canceled events have caused huge financial losses and heartache for many. This doesn’t mean that all is lost.

With time and the Internet at its disposal, you have a captive audience that is happy to use Instagram Live and Facebook Live, and many more social media platforms to participate in online events.

Live stream your product launch, store opening ceremony, or company anniversary celebration on social media to engage your audience and build an online presence. You can even offer discount codes to the first few people streaming your event. Or tell all those watching, something interesting about your product. This is a great way to grab their attention.

5.Use Relevant Hashtags

Ubiquitous but very useful nonetheless, hashtags are your go-to in these troubling times.

Maximizing your business reach on social media by using hashtags is a good way to grow your online presence.

Here are a few coronavirus-related hashtags that you can use in your posts:

• #StopTheSpread – To stop the spread of COVID-19

• #JOMO – A light-hearted hashtag that stands for Joy of Missing Out – used to embrace canceled plans and staying indoors

• #FOMO – The opposite of JOMO – Fear of Missing Out

• #Social Distancing – Break from in-person socialization to prevent the spread of COVID-19

6.Do some charity

The world now needs your kindness more than ever. Find out what you can do to help in these times of crisis. At the same time, you can let your potential customers see that your brand is a responsible corporate citizen. This is the best time to genuinely do good and build goodwill with your audience too.

Also, if you’ve closed down your business operations and allowed your team to work from home, spread this message to other business leaders using relevant hashtags.

This way, you’re letting the world know that you’re doing your bit in these difficult times

Long term strategies

After this pandemic is over and life limps back to normal, chances are that your business will need to cover a lot of ground to regain customers and revenues.

Post-pandemic strategies merit a separate blog post altogether and we’ll be putting that out over the coming weeks.

Take-away

In the interim, it is best to concentrate on your short-term strategies, because the future is quite uncertain. Stay focused on remaining visible, not letting your customers forget you, and offering services in the best way that you can in the current scenario.

If you would like some tips on how to reshape your online marketing strategy, please get in touch with a digital marketing agency. In the meanwhile, stay home and stay safe!