COVID-19 has presented challenges to digital agencies and solutions providers all over the world. Small businesses everywhere are trying to from the pandemic and digital marketing has become more important than ever. It’s a stressful time that raises a lot of interesting questions, so we invited a few online presence experts to help us outline some best practices and offer guidance in a recent .
Duda’s Director of Account Management Liz Powell, was joined by CEO of Andrew Shotland, VP of Market Insights at Greg Sterling, and Founder & Director of Digital Strategy at Kevin Getch for a robust discussion on how all digital marketers can operate effectively during the coronavirus crisis and help their customers survive the pandemic.
Here’s what we covered:
Read on for the full recap and video replay.
The Data that Depicts Our New Reality
Currently, available data about the global economy and COVID-19’s impact on small business owners does not tell a particularly pretty story. The US and European economies have both entered recessions and consumer spending has dropped significantly.
According to a recent survey conducted by to determine what effect the pandemic has had on consumer mindset and spending habits:
The data shows the consumers are less inclined to engage in discretionary spending across the board and 46% of all those surveyed said they would try to save more money over the next 6 months.
However, there are glimmers of good news. According to a conducted in March 2020, the vast majority of Americans believe that life will return to normal within 6 months and the showed a slight increase in discretionary spending through the end of April.
There is also good news for eCommerce. CTO Jean-Michel Lemieux recently stated on that the company had seen “Black Friday-level traffic every day” since the beginning of mass lockdowns.
When all of this data is examined in aggregate, it can be inferred that we are all in for a prolonged economic hit; however, it’s hard to know just how deep of a recession we will see and how long it will last.
The Impact of COVID-19 On Small Business Marketing Practices
Small businesses tend to think of their marketing spend as a discretionary thing. When times are good, they can spend heavily on all kinds of advertising and digital marketing services. When times are tough, they tend to pull back.
COVID-19 has created an interesting situation in which many small businesses are pulling back on marketing spend, but nearly 1 in 5 have decided to increase theirs according to a recent .
In fact, various facets of digital marketing were cited as some of the top concerns of small business owners in a
How to Talk to & Prepare Your Small Business Customers
Albert Einstein once said “in the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity,” and this statement rings truer than ever today.
Let’s say your digital agency has a customer with 1% of market share. They may have retained that percentage while the economy has contracted; however, now they are competing in a smaller market and need to work twice as hard for the same amount of revenue. In this environment, all small businesses essentially have the same problems, and not all will make it. If your customers can expand their market share to 2%, they will not only have a greater chance of making it through the economic downturn, but can actually come out ahead of where they originally started when we return to more prosperous times.
Convincing customers to pursue an aggressive strategy in the time of COVID-19 may seem like a bit of a stretch, but it will be made easier if you make the effort to fully understand your customers fears, uncertainties, desires, and decision-making process (FUDD).
Search & Digital Marketing Tactics to Help Your Customers
It may sound surprising, but local search activity is still happening despite shelter-in-place orders across the globe. People always need to know where they can find essential items and businesses that provide these kinds of products should think of putting them directly on the homepage of their website.
Andrew Shotland offered an example of a client LocalSEOGuide recently worked with that sold hand sanitizer and ranked on page two of Google’s SERPs for that keyword. However, all of the businesses that ranked higher in SERPs and sold hand sanitizer quickly ran out, leaving searchers scrolling all the way to Shotland’s client’s site. By optimizing for this search term and leveraging the full volume of traffic now hitting the site, LocalSEOGuide was able to bring the client to the first position in SERPs (once this was achieved, the client also quickly ran out of hand sanitizer).
However, there are things digital marketers can do besides the basic optimization of placing the most in-demand products front-and-center on a small business website to boost traffic.
These are:
Summing Up
This is a challenging time for everyone, and especially your small business customers. For many, their business represents much more to them than a source of income — it is often the manifestation of a lifelong dream. Now is a time to communicate with your customers with compassion and understanding. Proactivity is the single best way to help mitigate the fallout from the pandemic and it’s important to demonstrate to your customers that not all is lost.
We hope you find the data, tactics and strategies we covered in this webinar both inspiring and practically helpful and you and your customers navigate this difficult time. Stay safe and good luck.