The covid-19 pandemic has forced millions of businesses around the world to re-think their marketing strategy to promote their products and services. Lockdowns brought about the closure of physical stores and as a consequence of this many businesses have had to open and expand upon their online stores.
Here are some tips for businesses who are wanting to improve their online presence and expand to a bigger demographic.
Update Your Website and Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Friendly
Having a website that isn’t user friendly or easy to navigate could be the difference between gaining a new customer or losing a potential customer to one of your biggest competitors.
Due to the covid-19 pandemic, the use of mobile phone devices increased significantly in 2020. It is therefore crucial to ensure that your website is user-friend for people who are wanting to visit your website via their phone mobile.
Having an updated website will make the user experience easy and convenient for your customers. Time flies when you’re having fun or a good time, and that’s what you want for your customers to experience when they are engaging with you online.
A mobile-optimized website will also help with Google’s “Core-Web-Vitals”, helping your measure speed, visual stability, and responsiveness. In 2021 paying attention to these measurements will help your search rankings on Google as a result.
You want to be accessible to your customers on mobile and desktop. Most users will find you on mobile devices in 2021 so let’s make sure they enjoy their experience.
Automate Your Tasks
Automating your tasks can save you plenty of time which can be freed up for you to invest into more important projects. Automation in the right areas can greatly increase the benefits to your Digital Marketing Strategy.
Here is a list of things that you should consider automating within your business
- Automate Marketing Emails – Schedule your marketing emails in advance to your selected contacts. You can also set up email series’ that get fired off to different audiences to provide personalised follow-up.
- Automate Notifications – These are especially helpful for follow up’s when someone sends you an email.
- Automate Social Media Posts – Schedule all social media posts on multiple platforms in advance.
- Automate Lead Flow – If a user wishes to download a resource, you can send them an email right away to allow them to download that resource. You can continue to send them scheduled automated emails with additional information on the topic to help them move down along the funnel.
- Automate Analytics Reporting – Use Google Analytics and your CRM to track consumer behaviour. These metrics are vital to observe the growth of your marketing activities.
Satisfying your customers should be your top priority
Whilst it is important to take note of what your competitors are doing, it should always be a top priority to make sure that your products and services are exceeding your customers’ expectations.
You can gain insight into your customers by personalising your services and encouraging them to provide you with feedback by leaving reviews or completing surveys.
Rather than investing large amounts of energy into worrying about what your competitors are doing, focus that energy into creating a marketing strategy that encourages your customers to talk about your products in a positive manner online to give your products more exposure to a bigger audience.
When observing your competitors, it would be wise to critically evaluate their business and marketing approach and how your brand differentiates from their brand. Ask yourself what are your competitors are doing well? What isn’t working for them? How do they compare to your brand in terms of price and offering?
Use Social Media To Build Your Brand More Strategically
Social media is an excellent place to gather data about your customers that can be utilised to enhance your relationship with them. By utilising social media to tell a captivating story you humanise your business and sound less desperate to make a sale. Businesses should aim to use social media with the intention of building an online community that is passionate about the products you sell.
The best way to entice your customers to purchase your product through social media is to create a call to action by posting content that is either humorous, educational, entertaining or evokes strong emotion. It is important to share content that adds value to your customers life and most importantly entices your social media followers to join the conversation around your products by leaving comments and sharing your content with their friends.
Track and Measure Your Spending
Different online branding and marketing channels will provide different benefits to you and your business. As the common saying goes, “you’ve got to spend money to make money”. Prepare to spend, but you must be smart about it.
Spend some time to carefully analyse each channel, platform, or tool and what they offer to your business. Also, set clear and measurable goals for each activity.
You will want to do this so that you can properly decide where and how much to spend. Spending money on digital marketing should be done in a strategic way.
Doing things haphazardly will only yield ineffective and unsustainable results for your business you’ll effectively be burning money.
One of the strategies you could consider is to start out by doing small test campaigns with any new marketing spend and wait for results. Then, once we see which campaigns are successful, we spend more heavily on those and ditch the rest.
Be sure to continuously measure and have reviews of the results of each of your branding and marketing tactics and promotions.
This will ensure you’re getting the best bang for your buck, and alter or cease activities that aren’t meeting your goals.
Use Video on Social Media
Social Media Marketing is booming in 2021 and the platforms that are most popular with consumers is drastically changing. These changes are predominantly led by the rise of video-based social media marketing. Consumers are increasingly engaging with image-based content, as well as video content.
A lot has changed in the past 12 months, times have changed and apps like TikTok and Instagram Reels debuted in 2020, making videos likely to be the most popular form of content on social media in 2021.
Any digital marketing agency and digital marketers would strongly agree that video marketing is more effective at generating leads than a static post.
You can also take it one step further and try adding interactive elements to your marketing videos.
Interactive videos are a new type of content that gives the view the opportunity to interact with the videos themselves thus creating a high-quality experience for the user.
Customers prefer interactive video content over other types of video content because it gives them the ability to decide what information they want to view and when they want to view it.