Covid 19 marketing action plan
Posted on 28th March 2020 at 17:16
Let’s face it, life is far from normal at the minute. If your business falls into the ‘desire’ rather than ‘need’ sector, the chances are you have reduced your investment in paid marketing and that you and your team’s daily routines do not look the same.
If you have not furloughed all your team or you have an agency still in play, the big question is where should time be focussed during this period? Here are our thoughts on some digital transformation projects and initiatives, which you should bring to the top of the agenda:
Time for a site makeover
Was migrating to a new eCommerce platform on the agenda for this year? If so, now could be the right time to accelerate this, avoiding sales being impacted later in the year, when we all hope things will return to some degree of normality. It’s important to remember that you can expect to see a 10% to 15% drop in your non brand SEO performance for the first couple of weeks post a change. Plus, you have to turn your paid marketing off for a good proportion of the launch day. With a lower sales baseline, you can take the hit. Alternatively, you could look at some smaller projects to improve Average Order Value and Conversion Rate, including redesigning customer journeys or implementing new functionality e.g. site search, to improve product discovery.
Get your customer data in order
With Google still pushing on with their cookie-less plan in 2021, having a good grasp of your first party customer data will be more important than ever. Spend time analysing your customers, developing value, loyalty and lapsed segments, to identify who you need to re-engage with once the pandemic is over. You may even identify segments that you could communicate to in a different way today! If you don’t have one in place, spend your time reviewing the Data Management Platform market, understanding the value that they can add.
Lay the foundations to grow your SEO footprint
As results in SEO can take time, the tasks associated often get placed at the bottom of the to do list. Now is the time to review your sites technical architecture, on site content and plan how to get more people discovering and talking about your brand. Working with your development team to improve site speed performance should be on all brands to do list, as there is always room for improvement. Tasks such as revising page titles and meta descriptions and improving internal linking can be carried out by team members who would carry out your paid search management
Get on top of your product data Often the forgotten child, it is important to remember that your product feed powers up to 80% of your marketing sales and revenue. Audit your product feed, ensuring that it corresponds with how people would typically search for your product. Getting this in place will give you a head start against your competition in key marketing channels such as Google Shopping, as well as Amazon, which I predict will become the saving grace for many retailers who manage to survive Covid-19.
Get closer to your affiliates (in a virtual way)
In my top digital marketing predictions for 2020, I mentioned that affiliates would play a key role this year. Although I did not predict the why, this couldn’t be truer at the minute, where brands need guaranteed performance channels. Spend time speaking to your affiliates, discussing what opportunities are available to promote your brand and identify any reassurances they need. Affiliates will need clear communication on which products to support and any potential shortages, which could affect sales. Make sure you are doing this as close to real time as you possible can. It’s important to remember that affiliates are investing their own money and will want the guarantee that they will get paid for the sales they generate.
Have a bit of a spring clean
The last couple of weeks will have been spent answering to what extent I should furlough? Now is the time to turn to the subscriptions that you and your team have in place. Are you still using that marketing tool you procured last year? Could I downgrade my version or even move to a free version? Is there a comparable solution which has responded by giving a better price than before the pandemic? There will also be new solutions in the market which would automate the daily tasks that you would typically do, improving efficiency and profitability.
What should you do next?
Clearly it’s a tough time for everyone. No one likes some of the decisions which have had to be made and the tough trading period we are facing. This is the moment however to think differently about where we should focus our efforts. Planning and implementing new initiatives which will help with performance growth in the second half of the year, is what any brand should have on the agenda today.
To help brands through this tough time, we are offering an initial no obligation free consultation. If you are interested in taking advantage of this, please contact us today.
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