COVID-19 and Digital Marketing: What Should Marketers Do?

Times like this are difficult on everyone, but more so than most it’s impacting local small businesses. Things are constantly changing, and new orders come from CDC daily. Trying to decide what to do with your marketing efforts can seem impossible, but it’s never been more important!

So what does the Coronavirus mean for small business owners and our digital marketing efforts? Here are a few tips to help you navigate these next few weeks.

Tips to Keep Your Business Afloat

Cut Paid Advertising Where You Can

This is an area you can safely save some $$. Your SEO foundation will continue, but don’t pay extra for the short-term. Ads don’t require a running start, so when COVID-19 starts to fall away, you can turn right back on and be available. Don’t throw good money after bad.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Ads can stop and start with no problem, but organic search traffic cannot. Produce good, useful content to your target market. Use any dead time to revise old pages or articles. Google drops ‘dead pages’ every 6 months or so, but you can update them and bring them ‘back to life’ so you have more pages than ever connecting you with potential customers.

Shift Focus From In Person to Online

In store visits are down by 91% right now. Focus on what you can still offer people online, through ecommerce websites and social media.

Build Community

Social media has always been a place to build community and give your business ‘personality’. Now more than ever you can interact with people in new ways. Customer service, supporting your local area, sharing relevant medical information, etc. Show that your business is about people.

Avoid Too Much Focus on Mobile

As people are heading home, search traffic is up, but search traffic on mobile is significantly down as people trade their phones the larger screens on their laptop and desktop computers.

Focus on Making Decisions to Get Ahead So You’re Ready When Things Clear

This is a season. When the crisis ends, you want to be ready to hit the ground running! This means keeping up with time sensitive things such as SEO and Social Media. If these are ignored as well, you may continue to lose business until you can build things back up even after the crisis.

Don’t Lose Hope

This is a season. When the crisis ends, you want to be ready to hit the ground running! This means keeping up with time sensitive things such as SEO and Social Media. If these are ignored as well, you may continue to lose business until you can build things back up even after the crisis.

Current client or not, we’d be happy to chat with you about what the best options are for you and your business during the COVID-19 crisis.

We’re going to set aside time starting next week to chat with those who are looking for guidance in this matter. Sign up for your time slot!

Use this checklist to make sure your 2020 digital marketing plan is ready to bring you traffic, leads, and sales!