5 Marketing Tactics To Survive The Coronavirus Downturn

Coronavirus has had a profound and lasting impact on how we do business. If a company intends to survive this issue and come out rearing to go on the other side, it needs to focus on its marketing. Consumers are still the lifeblood of a business. When this all dies down, they will be the ones who will return to your company as consumers.

Marketing tactics during this time should be based around keeping the customers you already have and converting the ones you don’t. Several businesses have started looking at their marketing budgets as the first place to cut the fat and stay solvent. Companies that do decide to go this direction are setting themselves up for a fall. With your customers a captive audience, you should be looking at expanding your marketing efforts to attract more businesses. How should a company invest their marketing budget to survive this coronavirus pandemic and turn a negative into a positive?

1. Build Your Visibility

Matter Solutions mentions that brand awareness can have a positive impact on a business’s marketing ROI. A company should focus on increasing its visibility to consumers. The best way to ensure that you convert a buyer is to be the thing they’re looking for. This fact means that you have to highlight your brand at every step of the purchasing lifecycle. A few apparent strategies immediately stand out as useful in this case.

Inexpensive methods of getting more coverage during this time lie with developing great, shareable content. Leverage your in-house experts to bolster your authority on specific topics. If you have contacts outside of the business that can lend their expert opinion, these too can help. Evergreen content that’s already on your social media sites or websites should be updated to deal with current events. This update helps them to draw more attention to your content and get your brand’s image in front of more people.

2. Don’t Forget The Existing Customers

Return business is one of the most critical facets of a small enterprise. The Houston Chronicle notes that one of the reasons why customers offer repeat business to a company is because of loyalty. Keeping these loyal customers on your side should be one of the things your marketing budget is dedicated to achieving. It doesn’t have to involve an expensive national ad campaign or anything complicated like that.

Business owners tend to overlook social media as a method of communicating with customers. Keeping them engaged and inspiring them during this shutdown is likely to reap the reward of their loyalty after it’s over. Not only should you rely on your evergreen content, but you should also be investing in publishing more content that focuses on the current events surrounding you. Using personalized, contextual messages to remind your clients about your presence gently is also something you should be investing in.

3. Build a Conversation

According to The MIT Sloan Review, customer conversations, both online and offline, drive the decisions behind customer purchases. These conversations are instrumental in presenting your brand’s image. You don’t even need to do it in person, either. Several firms offer AI chatbots that can handle complex interactions with customers. Posting positive stories on social media can also start and drive entire conversations. People love personal experiences, and a brand willing to explore those with them is a brand they’re more likely to trust.

4. Use your Metrics

The only way you can know where the business needs to improve is to leverage feedback mechanisms. Google Analytics can give you a great deal about your website demographics, the length of a visit, and even where those visitors are coming from. However, social media analytics are just as important, by helping you to see what your most popular content is on the channel. Using this insight, you can develop more content along those lines to tap into your core audience’s interests. For example, a store selling quartz countertops, you can focus on content that deals with health and nutrition primarily.

5. Use Iteration To Be Better

No one method of marketing works all the time without fail. While analytics and technology have made marketing more of a science than it has ever been before, it’s still an inexact one. The methods you use for your marketing should be cheap and repeatable so you can produce multiple “cycles” and improve upon your model in each one. It should be flexible enough so that you can stop unsuccessful experiments and move on to another without losing anything more than your time. This race is a marathon, not a sprint.

Coming Out of the Isolation

When the virus has run its course, and we can once again bask in the sunshine, consumers will more easily remember the brands that held their hands through this trying time. Shared experiences like these help to improve a person’s view of others. By being a recognizable name that went through this with them, your brand positions itself to tap into their loyalty once they can once again.

Brett Sartorial
 

Brett is a business journalist with a focus on corporate strategy and leadership. With over 15 years of experience covering the corporate world, Brett has a reputation for being a knowledgeable, analytical and insightful journalist. He has a deep understanding of the business strategies and leadership principles that drive the world's most successful companies, and is able to explain them in a clear and compelling way. Throughout his career, Brett has interviewed some of the most influential business leaders and has covered major business events such as the World Economic Forum and the Davos. He is also a regular contributor to leading business publications and has won several awards for his work.