COVID-19 and Small Business Marketing & Sales

8 Tips on how to market your business during pandemic crisis

Written by Jhon Claude Mooray

COVID-19 has had a huge impact on businesses. Lockdown has caused some businesses to shut down. Other businesses have been brave enough to re-open with limitations.

According to MetLife and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index’s Special Report, 46% of small businesses believe it will take about six months to a year for their economy to return to normal.

How marketing will change in the COVID-19 era?

Whether your business is established and you are one of those brave owners or you are thinking of starting a new business amidst this pandemic situation, COVID-19 has drastically changed the game for you overnight. Everyone is looking for ways to get back and survive the rest of the year while preparing for more changes in the future. You and your customers are both affected and proper marketing of your business is a must for you to continue thriving and one of the best responses to quickly adapt is to go digital.

Why is digital marketing important for business? This COVID-19 threat created barriers for face-to-face businesses, word of mouth promotions, live events and conferences. During this crisis, businesses’ first resort is to the digital platform which is readily available, safer, and could cater more prospective customers.

Here some digital marketing tips during COVID-19 era:

Build your business’s website

Websites are cost-effective and can supply all the necessary information about your business including the owner’s profile, contact information, location and more. In the absence of having a physical store during the pandemic, your website could cater to all your services online and it could also be an avenue to execute various marketing efforts. Through your website, you are allowing your customers to still connect with you. It can also lead them to your official social media accounts where you can publish more marketing content. If your business does not have a website yet, this is the best time to build one.

Level up your social media game

After creating the catch basin of your business, you must level up on your social media marketing. During the lockdown, people are using social media to continue connecting with their loved ones and be up to date on what’s happening around the globe. So it is safe to say that more potential customers are now online. As a business owner, you must maximise the attention you can gain from these platforms. Social media marketing is not just about constantly posting, you must prepare a social media strategy tailored to your goals. Through this, you can also monitor how people see your brand by boosting your visibility in a certain platform, you can also manage and create a community that supports your business. Lastly, one of the benefits of social media marketing is you can analyse data. This will allow you to know what platform is best for your business.

Invest in content marketing

If you want to shift out of traditional marketing, content marketing is for you. This will help you market your business without making your advertisements sound demanding for your customers to avail of your products. Written content is one of the best forms of content marketing. Due to online presence, people are dedicating more time reading and browsing different search engines to know more about a certain topic through written content, you build credibility by giving important and related information to your customers. Some of these are blog articles, news, PR, web content, ad copy, sales page, or newsletter. Updated, trendy, relatable yet good quality content will make your business gain more followers. Level up and invest your money by hiring the best content marketing agency.

Optimise your website for SEO

To achieve your goal in marketing your business these days, a creative website design is not enough, your website needs to be found by your customers. As a business owner, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) must be one of your top priorities. In the middle of a crisis, attaining best SEO results should not be costly. Just take your time, there are free and easy to use SEO tools across the internet that you can utilise. SEO tools will help you to find what aspects of your SEO strategy are working and what are the biggest obstacles that are holding you back from improving your site ranking. So, why would you let all your marketing efforts go to waste? Be on the top by having the SEO experts onboard.

Start creating larger networks

After accomplishing all your planned efforts, it’s time to look into your market. During this pandemic, physical interaction between you and your customers was prohibited. Therefore, your digital marketing strategy must include ways on how you can still gather potential customers amidst the crisis. By having a lead generation campaign, LinkedIn prospecting, email campaigns, telesales, you can still personally connect to your potential customers. A lead generation specialist can help your business to strategise and implement tactics that attract new business accounts.

Keep a good relationship with your customers

For established owners, you must continue to value your existing customers because they are the ones who will keep your business in the market. Despite being old-school, email marketing is still part of the digital world. It is essential for building relationships with prospects and existing customers, leads and even past customers because it gives you a chance to directly reach them through their inbox. You must maximise the value of your customers leads by creating a database, sending out email blasts and organising email marketing campaigns. By frequently updating them about your business, you are letting them know their importance and it can be a more personal approach to marketing.

Check out your market competitors

Other businesses are struggling during this crisis too and you must still keep an eye on their services and efforts. Maybe one or two of your top competitors are ahead of you when it comes to marketing. You can include frequent checks on them as part of your market research. In that way, you will never be left behind on the trends in the market. Having in-depth knowledge about your competitors is a must because through this you can have an idea on how to handle your business when you encounter the same situation as your competitor experienced.  This information could also be tailored to existing marketing strategies that will eventually benefit your business or company. Never worry about your resources. There are competitors’ research tools that can help you.

Analyse your progress

After planning and executing your marketing efforts, you always have to analyse your progress. Through data analytics, you can measure and view the effectiveness as well as the progress of your efforts. By doing this, you can strategise and adapt new marketing strategies for your business. You can also pinpoint the most cost-effective efforts and learn where to allocate more of your budget.

Summary

For business owners, returning to the normal operations and recovering their lost revenue is still a blur because of the unprecedented shock brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses are adjusting to meet requirements amidst the ongoing pandemic. One way to keep operations going is by outsourcing. The outsourcing sector is also one of the many industries greatly affected by COVID-19 and there are the outsourcing trends you must watch out for that could help you regain your businesses.

 

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About the author

Jhon Claude Mooray