What is Online Marketing and 5 Reasons Why It Is More Important Now Than Ever Before

October 8, 2024

Digital Marketing Tricks Marketing Social Media Marketing

Marketing online was initially just an alternative platform for companies to market their products, opening up for new and innovative ways to engage with their audience. However, as time passes, the need for connectivity and staying online has become an essential part of everybody’s life. Online connectivity has been ingrained into our lives and the statistics tell us just that. As seen in Hootsuite’s 2019 report, users spend 27% of their year online. This increased usage of the internet over the years shows the need for an emphasis on online marketing, not just as an alternative platform, but as a necessity for businesses to stay competitive and thrive.

Gone are the days where it is just sufficient for your company to have a retail store and an online website that isn’t up to date and unoptimized. Online marketing is more important now than ever. Consumers nowadays look to search for products that they are interested in before they purchase them, with an astonishing 87% of purchases beginning with an online search. In order to capture these consumers, your products have to be visible to them in the first place. Without tools like Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), your company would find itself hard-pressed against competitors in terms of staying visible to the target customers.

Our article today will help you understand what online marketing really is. It isn’t just about creating a website and having a social media page, there is more to online marketing than that. We will also let you in on some of the reasons why certain aspects of online marketing is crucial to your business success. Before we get into the reasons let’s start with what online marketing is about.

What is Online Marketing?

Online marketing is the marketing of your products through an online medium. It could be through social media sites such as Facebook, LINE, Youtube and Instagram or through platforms that allow you to pay for display advertising space such as Google. The main objective of online marketing isn’t much different from traditional marketing, which is to help your business gain awareness, sales, new customers, target new audience and more. There are various methods to sell and market your product or services online, but they are usually categorized into three categories.

They are:

Search Engine Marketing

what is online marketing article picture

Search Engine Marketing is a component of online marketing whose techniques businesses must excel at in order to market online successfully. Recall that we mentioned earlier that 87% of consumer journeys start with an online product search. Search engine marketing refers to using techniques like SEO (helping your site to gain organic traffic in Google’s search engine rankings) or PPC (purchasing paid ad space) to get your product and website more easily visible to the right target audience.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is a form of marketing that is done through the multiple social networking platforms. The main purpose of engaging in this type of online marketing is to connect better and engage your audience, creating loyalty and awareness for your company. This is a very popular form of marketing for businesses as the usage of this medium is high with a projected 2.96 billion users to be on these platforms by the end of 2020.

Email Marketing

This is the online version of the traditional “snail mail”. Email marketing is marketing through the sending of emails to target customers. It is known to be the lowest cost form of marketing compared to search engine and social media marketing. Not only is it cost effective, email marketing also allows for direct engagement with your customers.

Now that we’ve covered the three different forms of online marketing, here are 5 reasons why online marketing is more important now than ever before.

Reason #1: Personalization

personalization image online marketing — Image Source: IMPACT Marketing

When it comes to marketing for businesses, every business would specifically try to convey and shape their message according to their target audience’s preference and needs. With traditional marketing, you are able to do that by crafting a message in your advertisement that is based on your target audience’s pain points to resonate with them. Marketers are said to have seen an increase of 20% in sales when they used some form of personalization in their marketing campaigns. Additionally, 71% of consumers in a DynamicYield research expressed that they believe that personalized emails will influence their decision to engage with the email.

However, if you were to use online marketing, you can not only just target specific market segments. Your targeting can go down to even the personal level through the use of email marketing. With email marketing tools like MailChimp out there that offers personalization, businesses can look to go down into the specifics in their message when speaking to consumers. MailChimp’s software enables businesses to personalize everything about their email marketing campaign, from addressing customers on a first name basis, to recommending only the products that they’d be interested in. It is this form of personalization that is only available through an online medium, giving you more reasons to engage in Online Marketing.

Using a marketing personalization software may be difficult for some companies that have to focus on their core competencies and don’t have the time to churn out quality content for themselves. It is also essential to learn how to effectively use these software in order to maximize its potential. Therefore, for smaller to medium sized businesses, a use of a digital marketing agency specializing in online marketing could help to alleviate these concerns.

Reason #2: Act as a Contingency Plan and Alternative Platform for Your Business

The current retail situation in the world is dire due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Online marketing will definitely serve as an essential platform to reach out and connect with consumers to help retain your company’s brand recall and even become the main source of sales during this period.

With countries around the world such as China, Italy and Spain going into lockdown and shopping malls being cited as the third most likely to be shunned places, brick and mortar retail stores are going to suffer majorly if they do not have an online sales channel. Such unforeseen circumstances also highlights the importance of having an online presence in terms of marketing and sales.

Social media marketing serves as one of the best ways to communicate with customers. In this period where people aren’t leaving their house, retail brands without an online marketing strategy may be forgotten by customers. It is no surprise as these lockdowns are going to last for quite some time and as the customers consume more media online about other retail competitor’s brands, it is very likely that those without online marketing would have a diminishing presence in the consumers’ minds. This is the reason why we are seeing many retail stores going on to social media to communicate with their customers. Updates on business delivery means and social responsibility campaigns can be run in order to continually engage with your customers in the case of such unexpected times.

If you haven’t already had your online store set up as a retailer to give your customers an alternate purchasing outlet, there are plenty of great websites out there. Sites like Shopify, Wix and WordPress are user-friendly and not difficult to use at all. They are great for helping retailers without an online store to build one, without having to hire a web developer which usually would cost way more than using these programs.

This COVID-19 emergency does serve as a reminder to retailers that there is a need for an alternative retailing and communications channel to their target audience. Online marketing is needed more than ever to help cushion some of the losses incurred during this period and help businesses push forward.

Reason #3: Increases Your Business’s Legitimacy in the Eyes of Your Customers

Imagine that you’re interested in running and one day decided to search for the best running shoes to purchase on Google. The first page results show the store pages of Nike, Adidas, Under Armor among others. Seeing these results, it is highly likely that you would think that these are definitely the best brands for running shoes since they are ranked so highly on Google.

Using pay per click advertisements and search engine optimization, you will be able to bring your brand to the top of Google’s search engine rankings for keywords pertinent to your industry.

Legitimacy in online marketing is a matter of honing your business’s perception in the eyes of the consumers. This is without a doubt, one of the greatest benefits to online marketing, especially in a time where businesses in general aren’t doing too well. Getting in the front page of Google will give your brand and its products the respect they deserve.

Reason #4: Drives Quality Traffic

online marketing drive quality traffic — Image Source: GraceThemes

Traditional marketing when done right can help you to reach out to your target audience. You can craft a message that your target audience likes and place the advertisement at a prime location for targeting them, yet not have your marketing campaign succeed.

The problem with traditional advertising is that while you can get the geography and message right, you aren’t necessarily going to be guaranteed quality leads. Your advertisements can also appear in front of uninterested people – a form of low quality traffic for your company.

This is the edge that online marketing has over traditional marketing. A successful online marketing campaign should outperform that of a traditional marketing campaign’s in terms of quality lead. This is so because in online marketing, you are able to be more specific when targeting leads.

For example, when running Pay Per Click campaigns on Facebook or Google, you are guaranteed to be targeting certain interest demographics. You are given the freedom to choose the keywords to target as well as the keywords to not appear on. This allows for more focused and precise targeting. Furthermore, other demographics such as income, age group, and location are also available for you to choose. The increased precision available in online marketing helps you to drive more qualified leads, resulting in higher quality traffic as opposed to traditional marketing.

Reason #5 Scalability Compared to Traditional Advertising

If you think that Online Marketing is going to cost a bomb like how traditional billboard ads or video ads are when placed in prime locations, think again. Online advertising and marketing are the most cost-efficient in terms of helping smaller companies that are trying to scale.

Unlike traditional marketing where companies are expected to pay extravagant amounts of money to get that prime television spot to show their ads to potentially uninterested audiences, online marketing allows for flexibility.

To run online advertisements on platforms such as Youtube, Google or Facebook, all you would require is a daily budget. Paid advertising on the aforementioned 3 platforms allow for businesses to allocate a budget for campaigns. Once that budget is expended the campaign would then end. You can then decide based on that ad’s performance whether or not to extend the campaign, increase your budget for the particular ad or re-design the advertisement if it runs poorly. This allows for easy scalability, especially for small businesses.

Additionally, the ease of just popping into your ads account to top up the advertising budget or edit the campaign helps give more flexibility to businesses. In a way, online paid advertisements empower businesses to make their own decisions with regards to their advertising. Gone are the days where you have to negotiate a display advertisement campaign’s duration and commit strictly to it based on the signed contract. You are given the flexibility to run your campaigns as you wish!

Are You Ready to Take Your Business Online?

After reading this article, you should know some of the reasons why online marketing is definitely important right now. It is not just a contingency plan for businesses in case of any unexpected circumstances, but it also is a highly effective and efficient marketing method.

We’ve presented you with some tools earlier in the article to help you get started with building your online marketing strategy. You could also pick up some tips from some of our other articles that will help you with the social media and search engine optimization aspect of your online marketing journey. For some businesses, online marketing may not be their core competency, which is why digital marketing agencies are out there to help people with their marketing. Either way, we hope that this article at least helps you to understand the need for an online marketing strategy!

Why Email Marketing Matters for Businesses?

As mentioned earlier, email marketing is also considered an online marketing strategy that has always been prevailing among businesses, even though the time has passed so far. However, email marketing strategy is enduringly effective for many reasons, which you may unintentionally overlook!

Allows Personalized Communication.

Cost-Effective

Promotes Targeted Messaging.

Boosts High Return on Investment (ROI).

Has Measurable Results.

Strengthens Customer Relationships.

Drives Sales and Conversions.

Helps Increase Brand Awareness.

Key Tips for Effective Email Marketing in 2024

Embracing the right tips and integrating them in the right way can help bolster the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy. As such, while doing online marketing with email integration, it is significantly important for your business to take these following tips into account.

1. Focus on Segmentation and Personalization

Segmentation enables your business to deeply understand the needs, interests, and preferences of your subgroup audience. Consequently, it drives your online marketing efforts to become more relevant and effective over time, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates. By focusing on this aspect, you can create more personalized marketing campaigns by using email as a communicative means to deliver your tailored messages to your target audience as desired.

2. Optimize for Mobile Devices

As you can see, the daily use of mobile devices tends to evolve more and more nowadays. Due to this mounting practice, it is crucial that your emails be well-optimized for massive groups of mobile viewers. In order to apply it to your online marketing, you may utilize a responsive email design to make your email readable through different screen sizes. Also, you may keep your content concise and scannable by using easy-to-read formats, such as bullet points and short paragraphs.

3. Create Captivating Subject Lines

When creating an email, one of the most imperative parts that will catch the audience’s attention at their first sight is the subject line. In other words, when it comes to email marketing, a well-crafted subject line can make all the difference in whether the audience will choose to read your email or not. By mastering this, you need to critically bear in mind which styles of texts can captivate readers the most. For example, you may create catchy subject lines that stimulate a sense of curiosity and urgency to open such an email right away at that moment.

4. Deliver Right Emails at the Right Time

Right timing is what clearly influences the potential of achieving more open rates through the audience’s interests. In this case, if you consider your target audience’s behaviors, preferences, and time zones, you will be able to figure out the optimal time when your arrays of audience are most active. As a result, your delivered email tends to be more open and interactive, leading to a wider range of engagement. However, it is vital to note that too many times of email sending can negatively lead to subscriber fatigue, which is totally harmful for your marketing outlook.

5. Emphasize Automated Campaigns

Notably, automation is essential in terms of its consistency and convenience for online marketers. To make it clear, by adopting automation to your email marketing strategy, you will experience a time-saving and systematic process while creating personalized email campaigns. This means you can spend the majority of your time in creating newly intriguing content and planning other marketing strategies. Meanwhile, you can also run your email marketing performance with a systematically predetermined timeline, ensuring the static and consistent time your subscribers receive their emails.

6. Provide Values with Clear Call to Action (CTA)

For content creation in online marketing, offering valuable content to your subscribers is always a must! Consumable contents drawing the audience’s interests may involve informative articles, exclusive offers, helpful tips, and so on. Remember, it is even more effective to provide valuable content that truly builds relationships with your audience rather than just selling your products or services to them. Plus, always don’t forget to clearly shed light upon your determined call to action prior to sending emails to your audience.

7. Check for Junk and Spam Scores

In essence, checking for junk, as well as spam scores is also crucial. It helps your business ensure that delivered emails are actually reached to your audience’s inbox in lieu of being flagged as undesirable spam. High spam scores can potentially result in poor deliverability, affecting your reputation and reducing engagement with your emails. By monitoring and improving your spam scores as usual, you can promote the chances of your emails being seen and opened by your intended recipients, significantly leveraging the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns in the long run.

8. Monitor and Analyze Metrics

After running your email marketing practice, another important task you ought to do is to track key metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, and forward rates in order to insightfully understand the overall effectiveness of your campaigns. These observed data can help your business make a sound decision and fulfill the niche of your marketing strategies.

Conclusion

To sum up all, email marketing is another online marketing complement, leveraging businesses to achieve positive outlooks through close relationships with groups of target audience. By upholding the use of email as your marketing tool, you can expand the possibilities of successful customer’s rapport, creating long-standing loyalty with a larger amount of revenue in the long run. As such, we could say that the power of email marketing can effectively bring about sustainability to your long-term marketing efforts.

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Why Storytelling?

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” — Steve Jobs

Believe it or not, one of the most powerful approaches to making customers stick to your business is storytelling. Storytelling has the prominent ability to captivate the audience’s attention, evoke emotions, and establish an array of meaningful connections.

Adopting storytelling not only helps distinguish your content apart from the rest but also helps build trust and loyalty among your customers. The more you uphold the art of storytelling, the more you can soar your content marketing achievements to new heights.

How to Integrate Storytelling in Your Content Marketing?

In order to mastering your storytelling performance, you should place a critical emphasis on these following steps:

Define and Understand Your Target Audience

When it comes to content marketing, your target audience is the essential key. The needs and preferences of your audience obviously affect the directions on how your stories should be narrated. Without the actual understanding towards your audience, it seems difficult to create an emotional bond with them.

Set Clear Objectives

It is imperative that you set clear objectives for your content creation. Whether your content is created for educational, commercial, or any other purposes, you should determine ways to share your stories with those intended aims from the beginning. After all, your storytelling can be planned to match your objectives in an effective practice.

Get to Know Marketing Channels

Each digital marketing channel involves certain differences when thoroughly compared to one another. In other words, unique platform’s characteristics require unique styles that suit themselves the most. This means the marketing channel’s differences remarkably influence how your storytelling process should be structured.

Here are some examples of digital marketing channels and how their uniqueness can influence storytelling:

Social Media Marketing

Social Media is a game-changer in digital marketing nowadays, offering a one-of-a-kind opportunity to interact with your audience on a personal level. However, not all platforms are alike. It is your job to choose wisely on how to reach your audience with the right storytelling styles for each of them.

For instance, Instagram mostly thrives on interactive and visually engaging content. Thus, its storytelling should be more personalized and casual, counting on some user-generated content and real-time updates to foster strong connections with your audience. In contrast, LinkedIn primarily requires storytelling that focuses on in-depth insights regarding personal expertise, success stories, or up-to-date industry trends.

Email Marketing

Email is also one of the powerful channels that help create direct communication in this digital marketing world. Particularly, owing to its unique abilities, effective email marketing should be attractively engaging, relevant, and tailored to your audience’s interests. Moreover, unlike social media, email has a longer lifespan; building an opportunity to create more compelling and detailed storytelling with specific audience segments.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is well-known for its keywords and search intent for satisfying optimization efforts. Therefore, SEO-centric storytelling will intertwine with a deep understanding of distinctive keywords and search behaviours of your audience. Because of this, the most important thing you need to do is to naturally keep pace and incorporate these elements into your content. This can help enhance your content’s visibility and relevance to search engines, resulting in your website’s ranking improvement.

Wrap Up Your Narrative with a Call to Action

With regard to content marketing, a Call to Action (CTA) always be the top priority for businesses. When applying storytelling to your strategy, you should not forget to shed light upon the main Call to Action prior to ending your entire story.

A Final Note

The application of storytelling provides businesses with the keys to engaging their audience in effective manners. By tapping into the audience’s emotions, it creates the dynamic power to transform casual observers into long-standing customers. This not merely promotes businesses’ revenue but also cultivates businesses’ loyalty and advocacy in the long run.

As you can see, storytelling is worth applying to your content creation due to many aspects. If you desire to launch your own storytelling without any clues at all, MarketingGuru can definitely help! We are a professional digital marketing agency, providing comprehensive solutions to unlock a better triumph of your digital marketing success. Contact us for a free consultation with our gurus and get started on your storytelling journey today!

Understanding User Behavior

User behavior is a factor that provides many dimensions of customer insight. Marketers adapt to this information to choose platforms and publish content more effectively, especially for iOS users who are fond of the convenience and fast response offered by voice search. They can ask questions through their devices anytime and anywhere. However, some users may find voice search unreliable due to personal preferences, privacy concerns, or a preference for traditional text-based search. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze and understand their preferences in order to tailor strategies that meet their needs.

Diversify Marketing Channels

When voice search is disabled, we need to adapt our marketing plans to reach the right target audience. To do this, it is crucial to understand our target audience and their behavior, as mentioned above. If customers are seeking more information and making comparisons, organic reviews can be the most effective content to put on the appropriate platforms. For example, Nike’s target customers include Generation Y to Z, so platforms like Instagram and YouTube would be the best match. Additionally, don’t forget to implement display advertising and email marketing to reach a wider audience and maximize visibility.

Optimize for Text-Based Search

With users relying more heavily on text-based search, digital marketers should optimize their content for this specific channel. Key strategies to consider include:

Comprehensive Keyword Research and Optimization

Digital marketers should first identify customer pain points and conduct keyword research to create content that addresses their desires. Utilizing tools or enlisting the help of a marketing agency, incorporate top-notch keywords into website copy, blog posts, and social media captions. This approach will broaden visibility and drive more traffic from text-based search results

On-Page Optimization

Improve your online visibility by optimizing the on-page elements of your website, like titles, meta descriptions, headers, and so on. Make sure your content aligns with what users are looking for and provides valuable information. By focusing on both search engine optimization and user satisfaction, you can improve your search engine rankings and have a positive impact on your audience.

Local SEO

If your digital marketing efforts have a local focus, prioritize local search optimization. To Make the highlight better than competitors has the service or products with the same area. Claim your business profiles on platforms like Google My Business, include accurate location information on your website, and leverage local keywords to enhance visibility for local search queries.

Content Marketing Strategy

Create compelling content that is high-quality, informative, and relevant. Enhance it with visually appealing graphics to increase user engagement and make your content more memorable. Continuously assess how your content is performing, track user engagement, and make any necessary changes to keep your strategy effective as time goes on.

Enhance User Experience

User experience (UX) plays a critical role in engaging users who have disabled voice search on iOS devices. Focus on optimizing your website and digital assets to deliver a seamless and user-friendly experience. Consider the following:

Responsive Design

Web design serves as the very first encounter users have when they land on your website. A visually captivating and intuitively designed website can instantly captivate and engage visitors, leaving an indelible mark in their minds. So, make sure to invest in an appealing and user-friendly web design that showcases your brand’s personality and effectively communicates your message.

Loading Speed

When loading speed is slow, it can cause user frustration and reduce engagement. Don’t forget to check the site speed for users who prefer text-based search. They are more likely to value a fast and efficient browsing experience, which can result in increased time spent on the site and improved conversion rates.

Clear Navigation and Site Structure

If your website’s navigation is intuitive and easy to follow, users are more likely to explore more of your digital marketing content. This is because they can find the information they are seeking quickly and efficiently.

Accessibility

Implement accessibility features to cater to users who rely on text-based search. This may include using alt tags for images, captioning videos, and formatting content for screen readers.

We hope you found this content helpful in addressing the challenges of iOS users opting out of voice search. MarketingGuru is here to lend a hand and put these strategies into action for your business. Feel free to reach out to us for any assistance!

The Norm After The Storm

The coronavirus has changed the way businesses operate and put some businesses out of commission. We are already about 5 months into this pandemic and yet the uncertainty remains. With questions like “How long more is this going to last?”, “Has the virus peaked yet?” and “When can my company get back to business as usual?”. These questions are most likely going to remain practically unanswerable.

What we do know for certain however is that there will be an end to this pandemic, the storm will eventually pass, and business as usual will be back in time to come. However, the impact of this pandemic will last and businesses must adapt in order to nurse themselves back to life.

Analysts are coining the term “The New Normal” to describe how drastically things would change in terms of way businesses handle their operations after the pandemic. The transformations undertaken by some companies to adapt to the norms of the current COVID-19 predicament will result in a shift in consumer behavior and habits.

For businesses to quickly bounce back and return to scale post-COVID-19, they would have to plan ahead. Reimagining and reinventing their own companies based on what this new normal means for their operations.

The signs of what the new normal is, point to going digital. A Nielsen research conducted in Asia has shown that consumers who shopped online the first time during the pandemic are very likely to continue to shop online in the next 12 months. Ecommerce and online sales have long been a thing and were always seen as the potential culprit in killing off traditional brick-and-mortar retail. Now, the once-rising industry has transformed to become a part of everyone’s lives, being the only way for businesses to reach out to their customers in these trying times.

This is exactly why businesses would require a digital strategy now more than ever. Crafting a digital strategy is a daunting task, especially for businesses that haven’t primarily engaged in any of their online channels prior to this crisis. But fret not, because this article is here to help. We will be discussing digital marketing tips and ways that businesses affected by this pandemic could use to help them gain a spring in their bounce back into the new norm.

Adding Value to Your Customers with Your Digital Strategy

Having people stay at home and not go out for social activities would mean more time to be productive. People have more free time now to invest in finding ways to upgrade themselves and their skillsets. This is evident from a quick Google Trends search on the search term “Online Courses”.

Google Search Trends for Online Courses have been on the rise

We could clearly see in the graph shown by Google Trends that there is a spike in the search term around the Mid-March period where many countries were going into a full-blown lockdown. Other search terms like “Online courses during lockdown” and “Free Online Courses During Coronavirus” are also rising search terms.

This is a fantastic opportunity for businesses to tap on.

Some of the industries that were hit the hardest by this Coronavirus pandemic are apparel and non-food retail sector. The rising trend of online courses can be utilized by these businesses. Businesses operating in these sectors could offer quality online courses that integrate their company’s products into the course’s content to attract new customers. For example, apparel businesses can come up with online styling courses or manuals that use their company’s upcoming product catalog as part of their styling references. This creates excitement and generates hype for the company’s upcoming and existing products.

Having quality content is also another way to boost your brand’s image. By creating online courses that enrich your existing and potential customers’ lives, your business will be seen as competent front-runners in your domain. This helps to perfectly prime you for business right after the pandemic!

Offer Free Courses for Your Customers, Like Moz did! (Source: Moz)

Courses are of course one way of offering informative content to your potential customers, there is a whole range of methods that you can also utilize to add value to people’s lives like Infographics and how-to videos. Just remember that as a part of your digital strategy, Google Trends will come in handy in helping you to spot and identify the types of content that people are looking for in this period.

Find New Means of Marketing

As a business, adapting to the new norm would mean re-thinking the ways that your business has been delivering its marketing messages

Media and content consumption has been increased due to this pandemic. GlobalWebIndex’s Media Consumption report has shown that 76% of U.S. online video watchers say that they plan to consume just as much of online video content after the outbreak as they did during the outbreak.

The increase in online video consumption presents itself as an opportunity for businesses. Brands are capitalizing on the hike in media consumption by creating video content to entice their customers, adding to their repertoire of methods in reaching out to customers.

As retail businesses cease to operate during the mandated lockdown periods in countries all over the world, companies look toward creative mediums to reach out to their consumers.

One emerging trend that retailers are employing during this period is the use of livestreams to sell their products. This is akin to the popular early 2000s infomercials on television where products would be promoted with their benefits being shown. Livestreams are evidently a well-received source of entertainment during the COVID-19 period, with Chinese eCommerce giants Taobao’s showing double the sessions on their livestream platform.

Similarly, the events industry which has taken just a big of a blow as retail with cancellations due to government mandates, have also taken to video streaming as a means of continuing engagement with customers.

With the likelihood of media consumption remaining about the same post-COVID-19 based on surveys, it is safe to say that your company should start expanding your digital strategy to include livestreams and video content. The new normal that we’re about to head into may be one that is dominated by video content and by preparing to content to properly market on these channels ahead of your competitors is what will help you bounce back after the dust has settled.

Advertising Ahead For The New Normal

Another strategy that companies can employ is to advertise ahead and market promotions that will begin after the pandemic.

An industry that could utilize such a strategy would be the travel industry. Neil Patel’s blog article on web search traffic amidst the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the travel industry’s search traffic has seen the greatest decline. This may seem like an alarming trend that should force agencies to hit the panic button and pull out of their marketing efforts. However, companies must remember that there is still a market to capture after the pandemic. Traveling will be one of the things that is on many people’s to-do list after the pandemic.

According to research by Acquisio, click through rates going down and cost per click going up for the travel industry during COVID-19. It may seem sub-optimal to continue advertising on digital paid advertising channels. But, businesses must remember, with the number of companies pulling out of their paid ads, it also means lesser competition and a larger market share waiting for you to capture.

Instead of pulling out of paid advertisements, we would recommend for companies in industries like travel and hospitality to actually continue with these advertisements. After all, you’re only paying upon clicks from potential customers. It would be advisable to carry on with these paid advertisements, but of course, it has to be done with some tweaks.

Flight Cancellation Search Volume During COVID-19 (Source: TowardsDataScience)

For a start, search volume for cancellations of flight, hotel booking, travel restrictions are sky high at this point in time. This is sub-optimal for your paid ads campaign. To counteract this and be more effective with your paid ads, look to add negative keywords relating to cancellations, COVID-19 and travel advisory. You should also be looking to promote on your paid ads, promotions and deals that can be used after the end of this pandemic.

Continuing to keep your ads up will help your business with regaining momentum post-COVID-19 as it would help give it continued exposure to potential customers, granting you the opportunity to cater to them after the pandemic. With some adjustments, your ad spending will become more optimized, helping you weather through this storm while preparing for the new norm.

You may not see immediate results, but remember, this is the long term that we are planning for!

Optimizing Your Webpages

The lockdown in many countries resulted in a spike in consumer online shopping. Whether is it food orders, groceries or daily essentials, many businesses have adapted their business delivery means so that they can continue to operate.

Post COVID-19, consumers that were once wary of purchasing their products online may become more open to buying online. The act of online purchases may become more ingrained into people’s lives as they get used to it.

The effects of the consumer online purchasing behavior may last and now’s a better time than any to be looking at optimizing your own business’s site to gain more exposure and traffic. For a start, you could look to improve your website’s user experience (UX). Start by asking questions like: “Is my website easy to navigate?”, “Would I be able to find what I want as a consumer?”. Improvements to the UX of your website can help greatly in this period as it could drive more conversions by lessening frustrated customers that churn due to a bad UX. You can further improve your customer’s UX by quickening your webpage’s load speed as well – which, might we add, is also a crucial ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm. Other things that you can do would be to publish valuable content related to your products and industry. These would help you rank better in the results page. For more methods on helping your site rank better on Google, check out our article on actionable SEO tips.

Optimizing of your website for the search engine during this time would be one of those good long term investments that you’re making for your company. By ranking higher during this period can help you gain new customers and maintain top of the mind awareness from your potential customers, which translates to more business when we transition into the new normal.

Consistent Engagement on Social Media Channels

To prepare for what happens after the whole pandemic, your business must retain existing customers! The best way to do so is to tap on your existing social media channels to engage them.

We have a global crisis on our hands currently and consumers are looking for companies that they can rely on and trust in tough times. This is an opportunity for you to prove to them that your brand’s reliability.

Give constant updates on changes in business delivery methods as well as operating hours during the outbreak period. Your customers want to hear from you and would be interested to find out the preventive measures your business is taking.

Engagement on social media is also another way to show customers that you care. Think of ways to run promotions or product trials and demos during this period to help ease some of the financial burdens that some people are facing. Discounts and trials will help present your company as a company that is making a conscious effort towards those affected by the virus.

There are other means to constantly engage your customers in this period outside of social media, but it is imperative that you have a digital strategy to plan out engagement touchpoints and execute them during this period. This helps you to have a consistent stream of engagement with customers, allowing for retention, increased trust and potential new customers after the lockdown period.

Wrapping it Up

Preparing for what comes after the storm now is crucial. You don’t want to be heading into the post-COVID-19 period, clueless about what the new business norms are. Take this time to understand what your consumers are looking for and prepare for what the new normal is.

Today’s article has highlighted the importance of having a digital strategy during the COVID-19 period and how it will help your business recover as we transition into a new normal following the outbreak.

Here’s a quick round-up of the tips we’ve covered today

Publish Valuable Content to Increase Your Brand’s Image of Competence
Find New Marketing Channels and Means to Market Your Products Online
Advertise Ahead for the Post COVID-19 period
Optimize Your Site for Exposure
Consistently Engage to Gain Trust

All these tips should help prepare your company as we head into a more digital normal – based on consumer behavior signals and surveys. If your company requires consulting from a digital marketing agency, MarketingGuru is here to help!

We are offering free SEO audits and consultancy for companies looking to transform their marketing strategy into a more digital one.

Stay safe, practice these tips and your company will come out of this storm stronger than ever.

What is Influencer Marketing?

You’ve probably heard of the term “influencers” on social media before. Influencer marketing is a collaboration between a brand and one of these influencers to market the brand’s product or service. The purpose of course is to tap on the influencers’ popularity to gain brand recognition and win customers from the influencers fanbase.

The question that you’ll probably then ask is “What difference is influencer marketing compared to using a celebrity?”. Influencers are different from celebrities in the sense that they can be anyone found on anywhere. They don’t have to be popular movie stars or A-list personalities. It could be a reputable journalist, a respected designer in the fashion industry or anyone in any industry really. What makes them an influencer is the following and reputation that they have because this is what gives them influence. They are known people or experts in their own domain and hence, this makes the content that they share the most engaging and noteworthy. Thus, businesses in their domains will look to reach out to use their influence on the particular demographic that they are targeting.

The Influencer Marketing Industry

Influencer marketing has grown into a $15 billion industry. Despite the problems faced by this industry, such as influencers with fake followers, it is still an industry that continues to grow rapidly. This can be attributed to consumer trends and behavior such as, 74% of consumers trusting social networks when making a purchase decision. Influencer marketing also has shown significantly high returns on investment for businesses with the average influencer marketing campaign earning $6.50 for every dollar spent.

While it is important to grow your business through digital channels like SEO, the influencer marketing industry is definitely a good alternative mean. The figures mentioned above should allow you to grasp how this industry is able to grow into an industry with the magnitude it has today. It should also very likely kindle your interest in trying to grow your business through such a channel. To help you in your influencer marketing journey, here are some trends that your business should look out for in influencer marketing for 2020.

Trend #1: Use of Micro-Influencers

When engaging in influencer marketing, typically businesses would want to be as cost-effective as possible. This means getting the most value out of the money spent on engaging these influencers. At the same time, businesses would require the meeting of certain KPIs like engagement, conversions and leads generated when utilizing influencer marketing.

This brings about the struggle of what is the appropriate kind of influencer to pick. Influencers can be categorized into three different categories: nano, micro, and macro-influencers. Nano and micro refer to the influencers with smaller reach – in the range of 1,000 to 100,000 followers.

Now, your first reaction is probably that nano and micro-influencers probably won’t get you enough traffic and awareness that your business is looking for as they could only get you 100,000 followers, at best. But, do bear in mind that costs for engaging in influencers are not cheap. Engaging influencers usually cost in the range of $10 – $25 per thousand followers for a post. Below is an influencer engagement pricing chart did up by Influence.co. You can see that the rates scale exponentially when it goes into the macro/mega-influencer range.

influencer.co marketing influencer rates — Average Sponsored Instagram Post Rates by Influencer.co

If your business operates in a niche field that the micro-influencer is actively involved in or has a follower base that may have interest in, it may be more cost-effective for you to use these smaller influencers. This is because consumers these days desire engagement with the brand and it has been proven that engagement rates are higher with micro-influencers who have an engagement rate of 3.6% compared to macro-influencers’ 1.5%. Higher and more genuine engagement is also more likely to help translate the extra reach you’re getting into sales.

Engagement Rates Among the Different Influencer Categories (Source; Later.com)

Trend #2: Emerging Alternative Influencer Marketing Platforms

Typically when engaging in influencer marketing, you would think of Instagram as the undisputed king of influencer marketing and that is probably still true today. However, there are other platforms that are starting to emerge as major channels in influencer marketing.

Tik Tok, a short-form video social platform has seen a sudden growth over the past year, amassing 2 billion total app downloads. Its young user base – 66% of them under 30 years old, has allowed it to be a platform that is suitable for businesses targeting the younger age demographics. Major brands like RedBull have also engaged in smaller Tik Tok influencers. RedBull hired KeeOh, a Tik Tok content creator with 5,000 followers to create a funny short video involving their product, using humor to make the followers interested in its product. It is a perfect example of using smaller-scale influencers to gain cost-effective yields on TikTok by utilizing memorable content.

Twitch, which is a video game streaming site, home to the best gamers and internet personalities, is also utilized by non-gaming related brands to advertise their products. For example, KFC has used one popular Twitch PUBG streamer’s (Dr. Lupo) channel to advertise their marketing campaign. This helps their brand be noticed by the viewers and create demand amongst them. Twitch’s platform, while primarily gaming related, also has streaming categories such as “Just Chatting” and “IRL”, allowing these streaming personalities to just stream live feeds of themselves hanging out and talking to viewers instead of playing games. The interactivity for influencers on these platforms with their audience is high because of the live chat in each streamer’s channel, which allows advertisers to also engage almost directly with the influencers’ audience.

These alternative platforms are definitely worth checking out as they may help businesses to be more specific in targeting and could prove to be more cost-effective in terms of gaining engagement and brand awareness.

Trend #3: Long Term Partnerships with Influencers

Another trend that will prove to be effective in 2020 for influencer marketing is long term partnerships with influencers. Brands are going to become more invested in influencer marketing and as such, they start to seek long-term partnerships with influencers instead of a one-time advertisement or endorsement.

Brands will start forming partnerships with influencers and engage them in the long run. This is useful as it creates more touchpoints for the brand with the influencers’ followers, allowing for more content to be produced. The result is a more cohesive campaign with a better brand recall among the influencer’s followers.

gymshark influencers marketing — GymShark’s long-term collaboration with Fitness Influencers helped them grew exponentially (Source)

One trend that will be useful to marketers in 2020 is to go beyond the series of influencers endorsed posts and have the influencers be involved in the products. Brands like GymShark were first to hop onto this strategy early on in their business. GymShark started off its marketing by sending out free samples of their workout clothing to influencers and eventually ended up collaborating with some of these influencers to create the influencers’ own line of products. The partnerships and collaboration with these influencers will help businesses to build a greater sense of trust and commitment toward the brand with their followers, resulting in long term benefits.

Trend #4: Using a Storytelling Approach

Generally in sales advertisements, companies tend to come up with catchy, memorable and short captions in order to ensure that its target audience is kept interested and that their attention is captured. In influencer marketing, however, it has become a trend for companies to do the opposite of the traditional advertising methods.

The use of an influencer would mean that businesses want to create a message that will resonate well with their followers. As such, the best way is to craft a story that details the influencer’s personal experience with their use of your products or services.

Instagram’s caption limit of 2,200 words has allowed influencers to write in detail their story and experience with using the endorsed product or service. Functions like Instagram Stories can also be utilized to craft a cohesive story regarding your brand.

Since followers of these influencers get a glimpse into their daily personal lives, they would be able to understand and see some of the struggles faced by these influencers. By showing how your company’s product or service helps these influencers solve some of the issues that they face or their personal experience with your product, their followers would be more sold and feel more involved with the product.

Trend #5: Utilizing Video Content

Video content in marketing is definitely hot with online marketers now with 87% of them using it. This is probably due to how video content gains on average, 135% more organic reach as compared to other forms of content.

This explains why it is essential to incorporate video content marketing into your influencer marketing campaign. Influencers are able to help you create an array of different video content, from product reviews to short-form stories, unboxing videos and even live streams

By creating content based around your product will allow these influencers to better promote your product and in the case of live streams, they can engage your target audience better as it allows for direct chatting with their followers. The result of these efforts is a greater appeal visually for your target audience.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a channel of marketing that should be tapped on due to the number of engagements and brand recognition you can create. These 5 trends on Influencer Marketing in 2020 should be able to help guide and give you an idea of how your influencer marketing campaign should be like.

You may wish to consult a digital marketing agency with these tips in mind to help you run your next influencer marketing campaign!

Conclusion

Content marketing is indeed not as easy as the name would suggest. We know that this might be quite a bit of information to learn, digest and execute. Incepting a successful content marketing campaign is definitely not the easiest thing to do, but with proper planning, creativity and time, it is achievable. It is definitely worth it a shot if you’re new into digital marketing, although alternatively some companies prefer to outsource this effort to a digital marketing agency.

If there is any one key takeaway that you should remember from reading this article, it has to be value. Always remember that in content, value creation is key, value creation is king!

Now that you’ve learnt what content marketing is about, why not delve deeper into the depths of digital marketing by learning more about how to build a digital marketing strategy for your business! Or maybe since you probably would have content that you’d need to post on social media, how about you read an article on the 3 basic Facebook marketing mistakes you should avoid?

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Terms

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a method of digital marketing where businesses pay for the clicks received to their website through search engines. These advertisements are run on platforms such as Google, Facebook and LINE Ad Platform to name a few.

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR refers to the percentage of users who click on your link per impression. Calculating CTR is simple, you just have to take the total number of clicks to your link in the ad and divide it by the impressions, which is the total number of times that it was shown to people. CTR shows how engaged people are with your advertisements or link, helping you determine if the advertisement is effective in getting people to click.

2. Cost Per Impression (Sometimes known as CPM)

CPI generally refers to the rate that is being paid for 1,000 views of an advertisement. Impressions strictly refer to an appearance of your ad in front of your user, regardless of whether or not the user has engaged with the advertisement.

3. Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are keywords that can be added to your advertising campaigns to ensure that your ads are not displayed when people search certain terms. For example if you don’t want your advertisements for your travel agency to show up when someone searches for tour cancellations, you can add in the broad match negative keyword “cancel” to your campaign. This helps to increase your lead quality, boosting your campaign’s effectiveness.

4. Geo-Targeting

Geo-Targeting is a method used to specifically target and only reach the users from the area of your choosing. The method of geo-targeting is good especially for local businesses looking to draw the crowd of around their vicinity. Google is able to locate where a person is searching from and will only show them ads that are the most relevant to them

5. Broad Keyword Match

When adding in a new keyword to target for a PPC advertising campaign, the default match setting will be broad match. This basically means that if somebody searches for your keyword in any variation, your advertisement will appear.

6. Exact Keyword Match

When you choose exact keyword match your advertisement only shows up when a user keys in the EXACT same phrase as your keyword in the exact way that it is written. This means that your advertisement will not show even if relevant keywords are being queried. This is good for your ad if you don’t want it shown against the broad range of search variants that people could search for to get to your products.

7. Phrase Match

Phrase match is a PPC keyword setting that only shows your ad when the user’s search has the exact phrase of your keyword or similar variations of the phrase of your keyword. Phrase match allows for additional words before or after the keyword phrase.

8. Cost Per Click (CPC)

CPC refers to the average cost that you are being charged for a single user’s click on your advertisement. Cost Per Click can be calculated by taking the amount spent on the campaign divided by the total number of clicks from users. CPC is an essential tool when running PPC campaigns because an optimal advertising campaign would best have low cost per click, maximizing the value of each click.

9. Remarketing

essential digital marketing term remarketing ads — Example of Remarketing Ad (Source: BlueCorona)

Your business ads will be shown to users who have previously visited your website when they continue browsing other pages on the display advertising platform. Remarketing is an especially useful tool for convincing potential buyers who have shown interest in your website but previously decided not to make a purchase for various reasons. The purpose of utilizing remarketing is to target high-quality leads, as these previous visitors have higher intent and are more relevant to engage with.

10. Dynamic Product Ads (DPA)

essential digital marketing term dynamic product advertisement example — Example of Dynamic Product Advertisement (Source: Advertisemint)

Dynamic product ads (DPAs) are paid advertisements that appear on Facebook and Instagram, making them relevant to both PPC and Social Media Marketing. Like retargeting ads, DPAs target individuals who have shown interest in your website based on their internet browsing history. Businesses with a wide product catalog ranging from 10 to 20 products find DPAs particularly useful. DPAs dynamically display different sets of items from the product catalog to users with varying interests, giving them the name “dynamic.” Users can set their goals for DPAs, whether it involves upselling or cross-selling products. DPAs serve as an effective retargeting method for companies looking to expose their customers to complementary products.

Search Engine Optimization Terms

This is the part of the glossary that confuses people. Businesses looking to acquire SEO services are often met with companies that will give them recommendations or tell that what they would do to optimize the website. Things like meta description, alternate text and backlink building will be some commonly seen terms. The following section will explain these keywords (pun intended) relating to SEO and help you in the future when you encounter them.

11. Meta Description and Meta Title

Meta description, keywords and titles are tags that are added inside the HTML document of a website.

meta title and meta description — Meta Title and Meta Description

The meta description serves as a concise summary of a page’s content and appears in the snippet of the search engine results page. These descriptions play a vital role in increasing user click-through rates when engaging with search results.

Meta titles, on the other hand, function as the “name tag” for a webpage. They serve as the title of the webpage itself and are displayed on the browser tab, indicating the current page to the user. Meta titles are crucial elements in search engine optimization (SEO) as search engines read them, and altering them can impact your website’s search engine rankings.

12. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to optimization to help your business rank better on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that occurs off your business’s webpage itself. These form of optimization could come in the form of lead generation activities such as email marketing, social media marketing or even content marketing.

Generally when SEO companies talk about helping your brand do off-page SEO, they are referring to backlink building (another term in this guide!). Backlink building is a strong off-page SEO technique for helping your business rank better on search engines as backlinks help search engine robots to recognize your website as being more trustworthy and credible.

13. On Page SEO

On-page SEO are optimization activities that happen within a website. On-Page SEO activities include writing quality relevant content for your keywords, optimizing your webpage’s load speed (yes, this matters in helping you rank better!) and tagging pictures with alternate text. All of these would help in making your web page rank better for your keywords as it would increase your web page’s relevance to search engines.

14. Organic Search

Organic search refers to the unpaid listings on the Search Engine Results Page. The display of organic search results is determined by the relevance ranking of a web page to a search term. Search engine algorithms evaluate this relevancy to provide users with the most relevant search results based on their queries.

Likewise, when companies refer to organic traffic, they are discussing the unpaid traffic that a website receives.

15. White Hat SEO

One feature that digital marketing companies like to promote is their white hat SEO techniques. White hat techniques basically refer to techniques that comply with Google’s guidelines. This means that when a company promotes themselves as using white hat tactics, they are basically just telling you that they do not engage in unethical SEO methods like keyword stuffing which would result in penalties from Google.

16. Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to the text that is being used to hyperlink to your website. Anchor texts are important in SEO because it helps Google’s search engine algorithm understand what the page that is linked to the anchor is about. For example if I were to link a page in this article using the anchor text “Budget Hotels”, Google would be able to tell that the page is likely to be a page related to budget hotels

By doing this often enough in a natural manner, Google will be confident that the page in question has definitely got to be relevant to the search term budget hotel and will therefore rank it for that search term.

17. Robots.txt

Robots.txt is also known as the robots exclusion protocol. This is a standard that helps website to convey to web crawlers and robots which pages of the website it should crawl and which parts of the website should not be scanned.

The robots.txt file is important in SEO as it will help you to block off pages that are duplicates in your website to web crawlers. Blocking them off will improve your web site’s search engine performance as duplicate pages can hurt SEO rankings. Additionally, robots.txt help you to block off pages from users and not allow them to be indexed on Google’s search engine results page.

18. Web Crawlers

Web Crawlers are robots that are used by search engines to index the content of websites all over the internet. Crawling the web to search for sites will lead to these websites being indexed by Google so that it appears in search engine results

19. Responsive Site

This refers to having a website that is designed to adapt according to the user’s screen size. Regardless of the user viewing it on a desktop or on mobile, a responsive site will change accordingly to fit the screen size.

Having a responsive site helps your website rank better in search engines because Google does mobile-first indexing, primarily prioritizing the indexing of a website’s mobile site first. This shows the added emphasis for having a responsive site.

20. Backlink or Inbound Link

Backlinks, sometime known as inbound links, are links to a webpage that comes from an external website. An example of this would be if this blog article were to be linked on another website, it would count as an inbound link to MarketingGuru.

21. Domain Authority

Domain authority is a score that is developed to indicate a website’s relevance towards a specific field or industry. The relevance of the website impacts a website’s ranking by search engine as search engines algorithms take into account domain authority when trying to rank websites.

22. Long-Tail Keyword

Long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that are typically three to five words long. These phrases are specific and are usually in the form of questions. The significance of using long-tail keywords is that they are generally easier to rank for compared to normal keyword phrases. They also are very specific, which implies that the customer searching for this already know what exactly it is they want, this makes them a higher quality lead as it takes less to convince them to buy your products.

Social Media Marketing

Last but not least, we will be covering some of the commonly seen terms in Social Media Marketing.

23. Lookalike Audience

Lookalike audience are created by using emails list. Lookalike audiences refer to users that are similar to your existing customers/users. To target lookalike audience, you can upload your email list onto your Facebook campaign. Facebook will then use data of these emails and find users similar to that of those in the email list to target.

Lookalike audience is particularly useful in helping companies discover new customers similar to their existing customers.

24. Engagement

Engagement in Social Media refers to interaction that users have with your brand. They may come in the form of comments, shares or likes. Having higher engagement is great for your brand as it helps search engine view your website as being more credible, helping you get better domain scores.

25. A/B Testing

This term could fall under multiple categories, but we generally use this method for paid social media advertisements and Google advertisements. A/B testing refers to split testing in which you will run around 2 to 3 similar ads at the same time and determine which one is the better performing ad. After which, you can choose to use the advertisement that perform the best as the main advertisement or make alterations to the worse performing advertisements.

A/B testing is useful in helping you learn what your target audience likes more and is essential in optimizing your social media advertising campaigns.

26. Relevance Score

For Facebook advertising campaigns, there will be a metric known as the relevance score. This score is given to your advertisements by Facebook and will help them to determine the relevancy of your ad to keywords.

Relevance score is an important factor as a higher relevance score would allow for your ads to show up more often compared to your competitors and for less money. This will help drive down Cost Per Clicks in your Facebook advertisements.

That Was a Whole Lot!

That was, indeed, plenty of Digital Marketing terms for one article! We hope that you were able to learn something new today and cleared up some of your queries with regard to certain digital marketing terms.

Having a better understanding of these terms can help you as an aspiring marketer learn how to fix things when something goes wrong with your campaign. As a business owner, learning these terms will help you to know what some of the marketing agencies you’ve contacted are talking about when you’re being pitched to.

We know that this article doesn’t cover the full scope of digital marketing terms. Let’s face it, there’s a whole lot of it out there! But if you have any questions regarding digital marketing terms or digital marketing strategies, feel free to contact our gurus at MarketingGuru! We will be more than happy to help you with improving your digital marketing knowledge.

Don’t Panic and Pull the Plug on Your Campaigns!

The COVID-19 period will be trying times for businesses. Those that are operating on tight cash flows will struggle to stay afloat. However, we must realize that this epidemic will not last forever and eventually, life will carry on. This is no time for you to panic and bail on your business.

We’ve heard from customers and customers of our friends that are concerned about their marketing campaigns, with some even pulling the plugs on their campaign and keeping their marketing on hold until the hold epidemic dies down. For brick-and-mortar stores, this is a good time to look into alternative marketing methods. Online marketing could be an avenue worth exploring if you’re a retailer that hasn’t engaged in it yet. In our opinion, when dealing with the business downturn, companies should look for alternative means to market rather than to immediately pull the plug. Reason being, pulling the plug on your campaigns now might potentially lead to an even harder struggle when trying to recover from the downturn. You will very likely be competing in an oversaturated environment as businesses aggressively market in an attempt to recover from the impact of COVID-19.

The use of online marketing to help tank some of the damage that your business is about to take in this period is crucial. Marketing firm Dentsu Aegis Network’s research has shown that 14% of 155 surveyed stated that they were moving their offline media budget to online media. This makes sense as the more this virus progresses on, the more people are going to take it more seriously and self-isolate. Thus resulting in higher internet usage naturally as these are some of the forms of entertainment for people to pass time when they’re not outside.

What we would suggest for businesses to do in this trying period is to prepare for what happens afterwards. The higher internet usage during this period creates more opportunities for your brand to engage with your target audience. Thus, if anything, your business should be looking to capitalize on these opportunities presented to you as a result of the circumstances. Here are some of the ways that you could use SEO and Digital Marketing to prepare your business for the COVID-19 downturn.

1. Prepare For What Happens Afterwards by Retaining Existing Customers

Your business’s presence will be important in these times. After all, if you operate in the retail sector, chances are people will start forgetting about your brand as social distancing and staying at home becomes more commonplace during this period.

In order to prepare for the aftermath of the whole Corona virus situation, it is important for your business to remind customers that you still exist. You are at risk of losing your customers if you distance (pun intended) away from them without any communication. Besides, it is cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones.

For a start, your company could look to create more content than before during this period. The idea behind using content to engage with existing customers in this period is that naturally, more content will be consumed as everyone starts to increase their internet usage. It is important to remind your customers and keep them updated about what is going on with your business in terms of upcoming innovations and promotions after the whole COVID-19 saga looms over. This will help your customers be reminded of your company’s existence and creates more customer touch-points to engage with them (although we would recommend you keep physical touches at a minimal of course).

Social Media is another great way to help with retention. This is evidently seen from statistics predict that ad spending on social media platforms is set to rise by 22.2% as a result of the Corona Virus. A recent study has also shown an increase in 76% in daily accumulated likes on Instagram advertisement posts in the past two weeks. These statistics show much extra time consumers will be spending on social media during the outbreak.

The key to retention is engagement and communication with your customers. Your customers are interested in finding out how your business is handling the whole COVID-19 situation and what alterations are made to your business delivery methods. They would also want to know that the company that they are buying for cares for its employees, customers and community by implementing measures to help prevent the spread. Thus, it is essential that your company partakes in social media engagement to remind your existing customers of your brand’s efforts in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and interact with them to keep them with your company.

2. Make Sure Your Google My Business Profile is Up to Date

COVID-19 has caused many businesses to operate on special hours in order to help prevent the spread of the virus. To help with your customer’s experience of buying or using your company’s services, you must update your Google My Business (GMB) profile. This is a recommendation from Google. Google has asked businesses to update their business hours on their GMB profile, update their business descriptions and write posts to update customers. For example, if your restaurant is only doing take outs during this period, it is important to let your customers know that so they can plan accordingly.

Additionally, you could utilize GMB’s Question and Answer feature to help people understand what your restaurant’s status is and answer some of their worries during the COVID-19 season. Get your employees to help upvote the answers so that it would show up in your business’s knowledge panel as the main question.

If you haven’t already set up a Google My Business profile (which you definitely should!), it is important to have one right now during the COVID-19 epidemic. This is because local searches will see a surge with more people searching for keywords related to businesses near them. To avoid catching the virus, people are looking to commute less in order to avoid large crowds and consequently, they will look for the nearest places to get their necessities. Now is definitely a good time to capitalize on local searches and gain more customers!

3. Have Anything Related to COVID-19 or Cancellations as a Negative Keyword

This tip is especially essential if you’re in the travel or events industry and running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisements. Due to travel bans from governments around the world, travellers’ plans get changed. Companies that want to help their customers out in these circumstances and improve their PR would offer cancellations and even refunds. If you are currently running PPC ads and in these industries, it is best for you to plan in the long run. If this all sounds very foreign to you and you aren’t too sure about what PPC ads are, we have an article written for you that explains the benefits of Google Advertising.

To plan for the long run, you could perhaps shift your PPC budget to target more keywords that are for promotions in the future. Plan for promotions that are only going to happen maybe 4 or 5 months down the road and start targeting these promotions. On top of that, another trick you could employ if you’re still advertising for your company with PPC is to add negative keywords. Keywords tied to cancellations of bookings like “cancel” or “covid-19” can be added to the negative matches list. This helps you not waste your budget on people who are not searching to make a booking.

4. Use of Keyword Research to Plan Business Delivery

With the different ways the COVID-19 can spread, businesses look toward different business delivery means. What is important here is that your business can make use of SEO and digital marketing to help with planning out your business delivery means.

Say for example you’re an events company. Instead of your usual delivery of hosting seminars in exhibition halls, you could look for alternative methods like hosting a webminar for your audience online. Or, if you’re in the grocery or food and beverage business, you would do take outs instead of dine-ins.

To help you make a better-informed decision on what is the kind of business delivery mean your company should execute in these times, you can utilize keyword planning tools. Not sure whether or not you should do drive-in pickup or curbside delivery? Should you do a recorded webminar in place of your events or a live stream on your Facebook page? Keyword researching will help you to make these decisions. By finding out which of these keywords have higher volume in your area, you can help make better-informed decisions on which forms of business delivery is more suitable for you.

Adapt, Improvise, Overcome!

The unexpected epidemic of COVID-19 has indeed caused many businesses to tank. We hope that in this article we were able to help you understand how you could use digital marketing and SEO tactics to help keep your business prepared for the months to come.

Just remember, this phase of COVID-19 will pass eventually and everything will return to normal and stabilize. Search Engine Marketing will remain as an essential tool for your business still after all of this is over. Do not panic and pull the plug on your digital marketing efforts, just adapt to the situation, improvise on your campaigns and delivery methods and eventually, overcome this tough period. After all, tough times don’t last, but tough businesses do!

If your company needs an SEO expert well-versed in producing content for social media as well as help you manage your PPC campaigns on multiple platforms including Google, Facebook and LINE Ad, do not hesitate to contact us now on our website! Our business is still fully running despite this outbreak so rest assured, we will definitely get back to you as soon as possible.

What is Online Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Email Marketing

Reason #1: Personalization

Reason #2: Act as a Contingency Plan and Alternative Platform for Your Business

Reason #3: Increases Your Business’s Legitimacy in the Eyes of Your Customers

Reason #4: Drives Quality Traffic

Reason #5 Scalability Compared to Traditional Advertising

Are You Ready to Take Your Business Online?

Read More...

Why Email Marketing Matters for Businesses?

Key Tips for Effective Email Marketing in 2024

1. Focus on Segmentation and Personalization

2. Optimize for Mobile Devices

3. Create Captivating Subject Lines

4. Deliver Right Emails at the Right Time

5. Emphasize Automated Campaigns

6. Provide Values with Clear Call to Action (CTA)

7. Check for Junk and Spam Scores

8. Monitor and Analyze Metrics

Conclusion

Read More...

Why Storytelling?

How to Integrate Storytelling in Your Content Marketing?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A Final Note

Read More...

Understanding User Behavior

Diversify Marketing Channels

Optimize for Text-Based Search

Comprehensive Keyword Research and Optimization

On-Page Optimization

Local SEO

Content Marketing Strategy

Enhance User Experience

Responsive Design

Loading Speed

Clear Navigation and Site Structure

Accessibility

Read More...

How can they improve your customer experience?

I-want-to-know moments

I-want-to-go moments

I-want-to-do moments

I-want-to-buy moments

How To Apply The 4 Micro-Moments?

Read More...

The Norm After The Storm

Adding Value to Your Customers with Your Digital Strategy

Find New Means of Marketing

Advertising Ahead For The New Normal

Optimizing Your Webpages

Consistent Engagement on Social Media Channels

Wrapping it Up

Read More...

What is Influencer Marketing?

The Influencer Marketing Industry

Trend #1: Use of Micro-Influencers

Trend #2: Emerging Alternative Influencer Marketing Platforms

Trend #3: Long Term Partnerships with Influencers

Trend #4: Using a Storytelling Approach

Trend #5: Utilizing Video Content

Conclusion

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Definition

What Are The Types of Content in Content Marketing?

The Importance of Content Marketing

How to Start on Content Marketing?

1. Goal Definition

2. Customer Definition

3. Figure Out What Kind of Content You Want to Create

4. Manage and Publish Your Content

5. Track Your Content’s Performance

Conclusion

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Pay-Per-Click Advertising Terms

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

2. Cost Per Impression (Sometimes known as CPM)

3. Negative Keywords