Online Marketing During a Crisis: Essential Tips

In times of social and economical crisis, it is understandable for businesses to have an initial reaction to pause or postpone marketing, reining back on all deemed areas of expense. This is often the human reaction to changing circumstances. And in most cases, this is not an effective marketing strategy during a time of crisis.

We are going to explore practical and simple actions that businesses can take to maximize crisis marketing in difficult times. I am not suggesting that marketing is simple during challenging times for businesses and consumers. However, there are new and changing marketing opportunities to take action on, plus many important roles for marketing to fulfill.

It’s not business as usual

Things have changed over the past few weeks:

1. Consumers are more vulnerable.
2. Behaviors have changed
3. People are altering how and where they spend
4. Audiences are not the same
5. Competitive environments are evolving
6. New trends have emerged

Now is the time for businesses to distill their offerings back to the fundamentals:

1. Who are they for? (Has that changed?)
2. What are the benefits? (Are they more important during a crisis?)
3. How are they positioned? (Does this reflect current needs?).
4. Why do they matter? (During instability, people will shift focus to essentials so this point is key)

A new way of talking to your audience

Brands that truly understand their audience will always succeed during periods of instability. The main reason for this is that credibility, support, expertise, and authority all become increasingly important to people when circumstances change. Too often brands are so buried in data that they forget the people behind the clicks and the conversions.

It is useful to invest in people understanding and data-led research when business scenarios change. This will enable your business to react quickly to changing situations and maximize the emerging opportunities before others do within your competitive space. Looking at spending attitudes in a crisis, your audience will be:

1. Increasing time evaluating alternatives.
2. Pausing or placing added limitations on impulsive spending.
3. Planning and moving set aside funds to future timeframes.
4. Placing increased emphasis on deals/promotions/offers.
5. Seeking reliable and trusted sources of information.
6. Wanting reassurance that they are doing the right thing.

The above are simply a handful of the volume of humanistic modifications that have occurred over the past few weeks related to the current social and economical changes spanning the globe.

Most businesses will have been founded out of necessity, providing something of perceived value and solving identified audience wants, needs and pain points. All of this business necessity still exists, however, the conversation surrounding them has to change.

Businesses need to be more sensitive towards the people buying their products and services. Make it clear why they still have a place in these changing times, and make everything easy to take action on commercially and psychologically.

Moving marketing budgets

All businesses have a financial obligation to maximize every aspect of marketing investment, and this becomes far more critical during times of crisis. Agile movement of marketing focus, media spend, and holistic marketing expenditure all impact total marketing return on investment (ROI) and return on advertising spend (ROAS).

The largest marketing outlay for most businesses will be paid advertising.

Businesses will be considering switching off paid expenditure at the moment, but that would be a mistake. Paid marketing, like all marketing at present, requires reassessment, review, and repositioning to maximize the returns.

In almost all cases, pausing spend in this area should not be the go-to decision without serious consideration.

Factors to consider for paid media spend in times of crisis include:

1. Content remarketing of key audience articles.
2. “Always-on” high ROI and ROAS advertising campaigns.
3. New trend experiments and budget reallocation.
4. Brand maximization of market share.
5. Media spend wastage reduction and account refinements.
6. Promotions, special offers, and discount intent targeting.
7. So much more.

The resurgence of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One interesting change that is happening across most industries is the added emphasis placed on SEO. Fundamentally this stems from SEO taking on some of the heavy lifting when it comes to maintaining an always-on approach to search visibility, especially when media budgets are being streamlined.

What this means to businesses of all sizes is that the often overlooked value that SEO provides is beginning to be realized again and brought back to the fore.

Practically speaking, this resurgence towards increased SEO focus is seen in many ways such as:

1. New content creation targeting changing search behavior and latest industry trends.
2. Increased keyword and topic targeting to replace any removed PPC term focus and dovetail with paid strategy and tactical changes.
3. Additional audience aware content items reflecting audience needs, help, and support.
4. Increased genuine location and community involvement (value-based brand and location optimization).
5. Targeting of postponing/delayed search intent (for example delayed holidays and future bookings).

Summary

In challenging times, it is understandable that people’s initial reactions to changing circumstances and marketing spend or focus, may not always be the right choice for the business.

It is useful to try to:

1. Take a short time to assess the situation.
2. Look at the data.
3. Discuss with specialists potential challenges they may have to any initial strategic thoughts before solidifying them completely.

Often this provides a brief time frame to become slightly more objective. Take onboard alternative approaches and some of the fairly simple crisis marketing actions identified in this post. I hope this post proves useful during the current challenges that businesses face and helps more businesses come through these times with a stronger and effective marketing approach that works hard for the investment made.

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