Marketing is always a little tricky, but when you factor in a global crisis, it gets really tricky. We’ve already spent one blog post on the do’s and don’ts of content marketing during a pandemic, but this week we thought we would talk about the ways in which you should adjust your marketing strategy to account for the pandemic and how your audience is dealing with it. Here are five ways the current pandemic has changed the online marketing landscape and how you can adapt your strategy so your business can thrive while we’re all sheltering in place.
Table of Contents
- Shift Your Focus
- Translate the Current Situation for Your Audience
- Desktop vs. Mobile
- Focus on Community
- Plan Ahead
1) Shift Your Focus
Your audience members are living different lives from the ones they lived just a few months ago, which means they’re spending more time online, but they’re also searching for different things online. Their problems have changed dramatically, and since your marketing strategy should always focus on the problems your customers are facing, you’re going to have to shift the focus of your marketing efforts to take into account their new pain points.
Help your audience cope with social distancing and feelings of isolation. Teach them how to work from home, how to work out at home, how to cook, how to save money if they’ve been laid off or furloughed, how to support their favorite businesses that are most in danger right now. Figure out what matters most to them right now, as well as how it overlaps with your products/services, and use that to guide your marketing efforts.
The same goes for keeping track of the competition and your industry as a whole. How has your industry been impacted by the pandemic? How has your competition adjusted? What are people talking about in and around your industry? Keeping track of all of that might mean you need to adjust your monitoring tools to monitor different outlets and/or to listen for different keywords, so don’t assume that the same old tactics you’ve been using are necessarily going to work in the world of COVID-19.
By the same token, you’ll want to keep track of both old and new keywords when it comes to search intent as well as results. The standard keywords you’ve been using in your marketing content on a regular basis might still apply, but there are also bound to be new keywords, such as pandemic, coronavirus, COVID-19, work from home, etc. Be sure to keep track of who’s using these keywords to find information, what kind of information they’re looking for when they use those keywords/phrases, as well as what kind of information they get when they use them (i.e. what kind of content your competition is creating around those keywords).
2) Translate the Current Situation for Your Audience
Help your audience adjust to the current situation by giving them tips for how they can pivot their normal way of doing things to the “new normal”. How can they do their jobs remotely? How can they balance work and family life when everyone is home? How should they cook for everyone when everyone is always home for all three meals?
Whatever aspect of their lives your business normally helps them with, help them transition that aspect of their lives from the way they used to do it to a way that allows them to be in compliance with the CDC guidelines for saying safe during this pandemic. Take those recommended guidelines and translate them into terms your audience can understand, specifically as they relate to how your products/services can help them make that shift.
3) Desktop vs. Mobile
A few years ago, Google made everyone make sure their websites were mobile friendly in order to rank in searches. That’s because Google saw the trend towards mobile and the fact that more and more people were using their smartphones and tablets to look for information more than they were using their desktops or laptops. That trend has only continued, and experts were predicting that mobile search would finally outpace desktop search in 2021.
But now that most people are working from home, they’re using their laptops and desktops to look for what they need. When you can’t go to the movies or drive somewhere, people have no need to check the apps on their phones, which means mobile app usage has gone way down, despite the fact that it was just a couple years ago that everyone was creating an app for everything. You were hardly considered a viable business if you didn’t have an app.
That has all changed overnight as more people use their laptops for both work and entertainment. Suddenly, desktop searches are up and mobile searches are down.
What this means for your online marketing efforts is that you just have to be more aware of where your customers are spending their time during this crisis. If your company has an app for healthcare professionals, then you’ll probably want to keep it updated and keep marketing to them on their mobile devices because that’s where they’re most likely to be spending their time these days.
On the other hand, if your target audience is more likely to be among the people staying home, then it might make more sense for you to shift your focus away from mobile and back towards desktop searches.
Many marketers separate their mobile campaigns from their desktop campaigns so they can be sure to get the most out of each one. If you know your audience has been spending more time on their desktops this past month or so, you might want to pull back on your mobile campaigns and devote more resources to your desktop campaigns.
It’s hard to say whether this trend toward desktops will continue once we’re all out and about again. On the one hand, people might remember how much more comfortable it is to work on larger screens and want to do more on their desktops even when they’re moving around. On the other hand, they might remember the convenience of having all the information they need in their pocket wherever they go. At this point, it’s still too early to call.
Essentially, this means it’s probably a good idea to pull back on your mobile marketing campaigns for now, but don’t cancel them altogether. You’ll want to be ready if people do reunite with their mobile devices as soon as everything is back up and running.
4) Focus on Community
Building a sense of community is always an essential part of any marketing strategy, and marketers have long been using the power of social media and other online resources to achieve that goal. But the fact that most people are stuck at home for weeks (if not months) on end means community has become more important than ever. The more we’re forced to remain physically distant from each other, the more we crave a sense of connection.
So give your audience that connection by creating a community.
Depending on the type of business you run, you may or may not be able to develop that community around your specific product/service, but it should be something related. For example, if you’re in a B2B industry, you could create a B2B networking group. Right now, that group could meet via Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, or any of the other video conferencing options available, but once we’re let out of our homes again, you can find a location (or a few rotating locations) where you can meet in person.
Facebook groups are also great for this. People from all over the world come together in Facebook groups to discuss business, as well as their hobbies and interests. Creating a Facebook group for your business has been a necessity for a while now when it comes to driving traffic to your website from Facebook. Posts from Facebook groups are more likely to show up in the feeds of members of those groups than posts from your business’ Facebook page, which is why they have become so popular among business owners and marketers.
If you haven’t yet started a Facebook group for your business, or if you started one, but haven’t really put the effort into growing it, now is the time to do so.
The same goes for allowing comments on your blog posts and encouraging people to comment. You should always be sure to respond to comments on your blog posts, but also let commenters respond to each other and discuss your content because that’s what fosters a sense of community.
However, you’ll want to be sure to moderate both your Facebook group and the comments section of your blog because there will inevitably be spammers and people who want to get nasty, and that’s not good for anyone. Maintain a strict code of conduct for both your comments section and your Facebook group and make that code public so people aren’t surprised or confused when you delete posts that don’t abide by that code.
5) Plan Ahead
While everyone is talking about the “new normal”, it’s important to remember that this is only temporary. Some things have undoubtedly been changed forever, but we predict most things will go back to the way they were. So, while it’s important to adjust to changing circumstances, it’s equally important to remember that, sooner or later, you’ll have to pivot back. While there was no way anyone could have predicted how big an impact COVID-19 would have on our society, we can predict how things will change as we all go back to the old normal.
What will change and what will we keep from these days of social distancing? What will your customers need from you once we’re all allowed to go back outside and interact with each other again? By planning for the switch back now, you can get ahead of your competition when this is all over and they’re left scrambling to readjust.
Conclusion
The number one rule of marketing is to keep in mind what the customer wants and where they’re looking for it. That remains as true today as ever, it’s just that what your customer wants and where they’re looking for it might have changed. You might need to do some extra research and adjust your strategy to keep your brand at the forefront of your customers’ minds during a global pandemic.
If you found this content useful and would like to receive more of it, you can sign up for our newsletter in the space below to make sure you never miss an update.
If you’re ready to ditch the DIY and have a professional handle your content marketing strategy for you, we can help with that.
