Businesses have begun implementing remote work and online work systems to cope with the many changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. While businesses new to the remote work setup might be struggling with adaptation, other braver teams upped the ante by taking advantage of existing digital media and platforms. In fact, others have begun investing in growth marketing, web design, and other development services to boost their brand’s appeal to their audiences.
Interestingly enough, the pandemic proves digital platforms have the potential to significantly improve a brand’s performance. If you’re a manager, you should consider taking advantage of this time to find better ways of creating a more powerful online presence. In this article, we’ll explore how digital marketing can help you in this situation.
It’s Not Just Offline: Your Business Needs a Stable Online Presence
If you’re a business owner, it’s likely that you want your business to attract a local audience. However, if you’re managing a stall, a shop, or a restaurant, the COVID-19 pandemic may significantly affect your sales. After all, you need customers to be present to make money.
However, having a stable online presence can help you adjust to growing market needs. For instance, a good online presence in this pandemic can help clients and customers still avail of your services through online platforms. Here are other reasons why your brand should have a stronger online presence:
- Websites become your brand’s face over the internet. Your website and social media accounts serve as your brand’s digital “portrait” online. Digital marketing services allow you to tackle integral parts of your website, such as web design and development, to make sure your content can accommodate your audience’s needs. It’s especially important to make your brand appealing to your online consumers. With 75-percent of internet users reading blogs regularly, your brand is in a position to get a steady audience with the right content. Brands that prioritize their blogs have 13-times the chance to see positive returns.
- Customers can be easily accessed online. Thanks to advancements in fields like technology and communication, it’s become much easier for people to access information over the internet. Moreover, social media networks, online communities, and internet forums helped audiences build virtual niche groups for any industry. Social media is an enormous opportunity for brands who want to tap into a niche market, as customers can easily be reachable should you know how to find the right website or group to send your content. Taking advantage of online platforms can put your brand in a position for growth, especially since 82-percent of smartphone users rely on “Near Me” whenever they search for brands. Moreover, half of the mobile searchers visit local sites within a day of exploring for them.
- Mobile devices have become a staple in daily living. You can tap into your mobile audience with a mobile-optimized website and content fit to be viewed in their gadgets. Considering the 52-percent of worldwide internet traffic comes from mobile, you’ll benefit a lot by making your brands more compatible with a mobile-focused audience. Moreover, you should take advantage of this opportunity to get exposed since more than half of smartphone users discover new brands by conducting mobile searches.
- Social media helps your brand be more human and engaging. Digital marketing strategies have become much easier to implement as social media can provide such a vast audience. Considering how 90-percent of people who search online haven’t made up an image of your brand, the right social media approach can associate a good reputation with your brand. Not only that but using the right content with the right posts can make your brand more engaging.
Pandemic Blues: How Should Your Business Have a Better Online Presence?
How exactly can stuff like web design, growth marketing, and even email marketing automation help businesses get a more stable, more reliable, online presence? Here are some tips:
- Never forget to track your metrics accurately. When we say “track metrics,” we don’t just mean installing and purchasing any marketing automation tool you want and then just tracking everything you see. Growth marketing is a strategy leveraging your potential for growth, meaning you have to track statistics and data that’s relevant in contributing to your brand development. Before you start any digital marketing California campaign, make sure you consider choosing the right goals and the right metrics to determine your success in said goal.
- Update your web design to be more responsive, engaging, and navigable. Your company website can have an edge if you make sure it’s a web design and development or focused on responsive and mobile optimization. You should also create content, and other services you provide are easily accessible to visitors. Good website design not only improves your SEO scores but also helps position your site for growth.
- You should show more multimedia and visuals to your audience. You should also start prioritizing creating graphics and visuals such as photos and video content to add some spice to your content offerings. Attractive visuals make them likelier to remember your brand and the content you want them to see. Leverage on your multimedia content, as they can easily attract audiences. While it’s likely that 20-percent of audiences will read your blogs, 80-percent of them will probably watch a video you’ve posted. And 64-percent of viewers become more inclined to buy products online after seeing a video about it.
- Take advantage of social media platforms. You need to take note of your social media platform’s strengths in finding the best kind of content to post to maximize your engagement with your audiences. Make your pieces interactive and capable of eliciting reactions and responses. Take advantage of opportunities to tap into as many social media platforms as you possibly can. For instance, there are 2.38-billion monthly active users on Facebook all over the world, with 500-million using Instagram every single day. Just these two social media platforms alone can get you access to a ton of potential leads and customers.
- Make meaningful advertisements. If possible, try to have your ads tackle a trending subject or topic that you know people will most likely appreciate or react to. A great advertising campaign can help associate those popular events with your brand, which is a great plus if you’re aiming for added brand recognition. Be smarter with advertisements. With 47-percent of online users relying on ad blocks nowadays, you have to make sure advertisements and other content you publish online actually provide value.
Should We Spend More on Digital Marketing?
Given the benefits above of digital marketing, it makes sense for studies to predict that 45-percent of marketing budgets of average firms will allocate to online this 2020. If you want to increase online presence, consider spending for things that can boost your brand appeal. Here are some other reasons that explain why spending on digital marketing may be the way to go:
- Do you want more viewers to stay with your brand? Make a website that’s not only viewable but also optimized for navigation and speed. Taking advantage of compressed media, smarter design choices, and better UX and UI features can help your website be attractive. Invest in excellent web design and development strategy so you can make a website that fits SEO standards.
- Do you want to make wiser marketing decisions? Marketing metrics and automation tools give you the data you need to make informed decisions. If possible, consider spending on professional marketing metrics services and automation tools to be able to access accurate information regarding your brand’s progress. By 2023, marketing automation tools would likely expect to be a USD 25.1-billion industry. This data makes sense, as companies that use automated lead management can see a 10-percent increase in revenue in just half a year.
- Do you want others to check out more of your content? Investing in content marketing means giving your content the means to be spread in a broad audience. You can purchase extra ad space and exert more effort to have your material posted on relevant communities and forums. Increasing your reach can increase the likelihood of people being exposed to your pieces. Improving your content marketing not only helps boost the opportunity for your content to read more conversions and returns, but this can be beneficial to your SEO efforts as a whole.
- Do you want your ads to work? You should spend more on making advertisements that directly tell what your brand offers to your customers, or how your viewers will get new experiences with your brand. Ad spends in 2020 will likely see 36-percent of budgets allocated to mobile in the United States alone. Paying for ads seems like a great trade-off, though, considering brands can make an average USD 2 for every dollar they spend tailoring their ads in Google Ads.
- Do you want more mobile users to interact with your brand? Mobile optimization might cost a bit, but you may be long-term rewards due to how many people use their phones. If you take the extra mile and make your content offerings and website optimized for mobile devices, you will make it much easier for mobile users to stay and spend more time with your brand. A budget allocated for making your content more mobile-optimized can pay off by giving you more conversions.
Digital Marketing in COVID-19: Leverage on Your Digital Presence Today
It helps to remember that having a stable online presence allows you to cope better with situations like the coronavirus. The challenge for businesses now is to make sure they can do their operations even without the presence of a physical office or physical coworkers – and digital marketing ups the ante for you by making sure your brand gets to your audience.
Marketing technologies such as email marketing, better web design, and growth marketing, can help you expand your branding to new heights. If you use modern marketing strategies, your brand can incorporate more audiences and services across a variety of areas, payment methods, and other factors.