When it comes to your marketing strategies, adaptability is key during difficult times. It is important now more than ever to stay in touch with your consumers’ needs and how their preferences are changing.
With COVID-19 affecting everyone in some way or another, consumers’ habits are changing. They are staying home more and spending more time online. So how exactly can you adapt your marketing strategy right now but still make informed data-driven decisions?
Anticipate Changing Consumer Needs
Identify how your customer’s needs are changing to adapt to the current pandemic and how your brand can help. This is such an important time to build relationships with your consumers and position your brand’s value. Conduct a recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis to determine which customers are recent, how often they purchase, and how much they spend. From there you can:
- Identify new trends
- Pinpoint how your business has changed pre and post COVID-19
- Develop a plan to address new targeting
Build Digital Presence and Focus on Consumers
Use this time to create content for your website, paid media campaigns and social channels. Plan out content that you can post while being mindful of current events. While users are consuming more content online, use this time to remain strong in your digital presence. When you empathize with your consumer, while still providing them relevant information and ways to cope, your brand will stick out in a consumer’s mind.
Keep Decisions Data-Driven
Ensure you are backing any marketing decisions with data. It’s easy to be reactive to the events occurring right now, but perhaps your data is showing that you actually don’t need to cut back in your marketing budgets. Or maybe you do need to cut your budget, but only by a small percentage. You can make these informed decisions by utilizing marketing analytics in your strategy. It is important to remember that short-term decisions will have a long-term impact on your business. For example, in the education vertical, clicks on search ads were up 2% above their 4-week average by the end of March. Spending and engagement also increased by 15% and 12% respectively.
During the month of March, CTRs have increased, as consumers are spending more and more time online and engaging with ads. Many industries have found more impressions and clicks on the SERP since the COVID-19 outbreak. Even industries that typically have lower CTRs in the past are finding their SERP results better. Average CPCs and ad competition have dropped in some industries even, making this the best time to really focus on your ad campaigns.
Website Reporting
By using Google Data Studio or another form of dashboarding program, you can provide up to date data in one concise area. From this, you can easily see how you are performing and where there are gaps in your website.
You can also:
- See how traffic has been impacted
- Create new goals and actionable next steps
- Build informed data-driven decisions
- Create new budgets
COVID-19 has changed many aspects of how businesses run. However, it does not have to derail your marketing efforts. By anticipating consumer needs, building your digital presence, focusing on consumers, keeping decisions data-driven, and utilizing website reporting, your business can not only survive COVID-19 but thrive.
