The “New Normal.”
While Part One explores how businesses can succeed during COVID-19 by adapting their business models and embracing e-commerce strategies, Part Two focuses on successful digital marketing and content marketing strategies. Since the website has become the new storefront, many businesses are being left behind or becoming quickly outpaced by competition. COVID has harshly accelerated that divide in some industries. Building relationships virtually, at such an isolated time, can better connect businesses with customers, help strengthen brands, and keep businesses competitive and profitable.
content marketing
Smart content marketing can help drive traffic to your website and market your e-commerce. Getting smart with SEO, starts with analyzing where you already rank with search queries. During COVID, search engines have seen “a significant uptick in at-home pursuits […] with a focus on health, and news.” Crafting content in blogs or webpages along with those targeted keywords and phrases results in capturing search traffic organically, increasing brand exposure that helps market products and services.
Don’t forget to target for local SEO too. Local SEO gained increased importance with the rise of voice search technology, but COVID accelerated that importance further with fewer people traveling during lockdowns. More people are likely to travel shorter distances to buy in-person products and services.
Social media
Social media is another important platform for content marketing. COVID saw record spikes in social media usage and downloads. Users flocked to social media for news, entertainment, and a sense of community.
Facebook usage increased 70% in March
Twitter’s user base grew 34%
Instagram usage increased almost 14%
TikTok saw 115 million downloads in the month of March alone
For large companies especially, empathy and authenticity is essential. During COVID, a very popular content marketing strategy for large companies was associating their brands with a sense of good. Such strategy meant changing content drastically away from standard messaging and, in some cases, dropping campaigns entirely. After COVID hit, Guinness “shifted its focus away from celebrations and pub gatherings [of Saint Patrick’s Day] and instead leaned into a message of longevity and wellbeing,” KFC suspended its ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’ campaign, and Hershey’s pulled its ‘Hugs and Handshakes’ ads.
Small businesses can also be very effective on social media, by focusing on “what your clients and customers NEED during this time and [pivoting] business to align in this changing market,” says Jes McGinley, Owner of JesMarried. Teacher Loryn Purvis’s cooking school closed during April due to COVID and she started a business Picnic Artisal Grazing, relying “on social media for 100% of our business […] People love photographing their food and sharing the fun things they are enjoying, especially right now when it can be hard to find fun, and that was a huge advantage.” Ally Kirkpatrick, owner of Old Town Books, finds that “one thing that helps our customers stay connected to us is that I am our brand voice – when we post on Facebook or Instagram, people know they are hearing from me” and although “it can be exhausting […] it also adds a level of connectedness that I think makes small businesses special.” Such a commitment to digital marketing can be hard to scale for small businesses, but the extra push can pay off.
Scaling a small business on social media with accelerated, strategic content marketing to a larger digital market could prove challenging with a smaller staff, which is why sometimes it makes sense to outsource content marketing to a 3rd party. Anette Nilsen, owner of Kielo Digital, started her company “in February as a response to a growing need for small businesses to upgrade their social media game […] simply doing it themselves no longer made the cut for accelerating the growth of small businesses […] Many are making the shift toward collaborations with fellow local brands, artists and influencers to create the content they want while bringing the essence of their city and neighborhood to life — and featuring the founders/owners more than ever before!”
Video
Video continues to dominate content marketing – both on social media and on websites as a boost to SEO. With COVID and more people inside and online, users are engaging with videos more than ever for a storytelling consumer experience. “Videos are bridging the gap for informing, educating, engaging, entertaining, and socializing with customers […] Although video was already on the rise before the pandemic, these extreme circumstances ‘forced’ brands to reconsider their approach to some of the emerging video marketing trends that they were ignoring.” Just how successful is video for content marketing? For one, “video generates 12 times more shares than text and images combined.”
When apartment buildings were forced to close, video tours became the only means for potential residents to get virtual access to preview units. For in-person events, it became the medium for virtual events, concerts, and conferences. Even as an internal tool for businesses, video platforms Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and others connected remote-working coworkers, classmates, and business leaders together in a way that humanized and strengthened the virtual working (and learning) experience.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is another effective content marketing tool for businesses. It can inform customers quickly in communicating how the company is responding to a crisis, changing business operations, or promoting different products and campaigns. Marketo reports on how some of the top companies used email marketing to inform customers. Southwest disclosed how they would handle flight cancellations, Starbucks shared that the store is switching to drive-thru only mode and TJ Maxx informed customers that they were temporarily closing both their online and brick-and-mortar stores. Many CEOs used email campaigns to emphasize the message “we’re all in this together,” to humanize the struggles of customers and companies struggling to adapt.
Though, the effectiveness of email marketing to drive people into action is mixed during COVID. Omnisend saw email open rates have increased almost 14% during COVID, but click-through rates are down 17%. More people are opening email, but taking less action from within those emails. Omnisend concludes this to “indicate a consumer shift to intent-based shopping.” However, the use of email marketing to drive awareness of products and services ultimately continues to be a “significant online revenue-driver for retailers” at a time in which digital marketing efforts are so important. Analytics can help drive future email marketing campaigns and their content by evaluating your delivery time, open rates, and click-through rates. A/B testing can be a great way to compare different how marketing strategies and how they register in niche demographics.
Pay per click (PPC)
Google’s Pay-per-click (PPC) ads target users searching for products by demographics – age, location, and by keyword. While COVID initially hurt PPC ads, “starting the second week of April, paid search conversions rebounded to about 89% of their pre-COVID levels.”
“Even in categories where consumers have pulled back spending [in PPC] right now, creating a branding impact now will have a halo and pay dividends when the market normalizes” because “the last thing an organization wants is competitors monetizing on branded search results.”
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Part Three explores the impact of COVID and the future of digitization.