World is passing through hard times. Unprecedented circumstances, as they say are making our day to day life as well as our businesses coming to a halt. However, when it comes to the digital marketing, we still see light at the end of tunnel.
Based on my regular discussion with our existing clients and industry contacts, its obvious that small businesses are the ones which are mostly affected by the pandemic simply because of cash-flow issues. Government here in UK has launched Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme for SMBs and more information on what your financial options are can be found on their website here.
Apart from the cash-flow issue, the biggest challenge for small businesses is retention of their existing clients as well as keeping their brand alive during this pandemic. Paid advertisement has seen a steep decline during the past few weeks with decrease impressions and clicks. However, because of the less competition, cost per click has gone down too as well.
In every bad situation, there are always hopes and positive things that businesses can adapt. Based on the experience I am having with my clients, here is what you can do to get maximum benefit during this crucial period of crisis.
- – If you can afford to keep running ads, then my advice would be to decrease your PPC (paid ads) budget to 50% and reduce the bidding to half as well.
- – If you are running ads on Smart Bidding, this is not the right time to use this bidding strategy, so I would suggest to change the strategy to maximise clicks or jut go to manual bidding if you know what you are doing.
- – If you have been busy with clients, generating business through paid advertising and not getting enough time to improve your organic traffic, this is the right time to crack on search engine optimisation. SEO takes effort and some time before you start seeing results and there is no better time to use your extra time in improving your organic presence in Google. This means creating better and regular content, listing your business in local industries, and getting more quality back-links.
- – Social media is the best strategy during these days because that is where you will find most of your future customers. Try to update your social media channels at least once a day with interesting content to help your audience stay up to date.
- – A much neglected digital marketing too, email marketing is something that you must utilise while you are not actively advertising your business. Send reassurance messages and your business continuity measures to your list of customers in a weekly email newsletter.
- – Remember, this is time to show solidarity, support and gain confidence of your customers. This is NOT the time to sell. Keep in touch with your customers more frequently and reassure them that you are there to help out. Because people and businesses are passing through hard time, it would help to offer delayed payments or discounts. At ZaheerMalik, we are offering all our packages at 30% less value than listed prices.
- – Take this free time to update your technology, website design or any unfinished jobs in your digital marketing strategy that you have been trying to accomplish since long.