30-second summary: Keep on top of content, evolve your strategy with the changing needs of your clients, be useful, creative, and engaging. COVID-19 has undoubtedly hit global business hard and that is bound to create a knock-on effect on your digital marketing activity. In this piece I have provided […]
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30-second summary:
- Review your channel mix to find new sources of traffic.
- Update your website messaging to show and understanding of the evolving situation.
- Monitor user intent to understand how your market is shifting and how you need to react.
- Focus on CRO, traffic is more valuable than ever, so make sure it converts.
- Keep on top of content, evolve your strategy with the changing needs of your clients, be useful, creative, and engaging.
- Five ways to get through B2B digital marketing and improve your website performance during COVID-19.
COVID-19 has undoubtedly hit global business hard and that is bound to create a knock-on effect on your digital marketing activity.
In this piece I have provided five key areas to look at that can help you minimize the current impact on your business and build up back to normality and hopefully grow in the future.
1. Re-assess your channel mix
Throughout the course of a normal year, your traffic channel mix will remain largely consistent, notwithstanding any huge changes in strategy or budget. However, COVID-19 has caused a shift in the way traffic is hitting websites.
You should start off analyzing your channel report and then drill down into source/medium to start to find any changes in where your traffic is coming from.
What you see here will greatly shape what you are doing, for example:
- Specific channels increasing – Delve into this further to understand why. If search volume for your product/service is higher than usual look for ways to capitalize on this, like increasing paid search activity or double down on improving organic keyword rankings.
- Specific channels decreasing – Again, it is key to understand what is driving the decrease, it could be due to lack of search interest, drops in rankings, and reductions of activity. You need to understand why if you are to remedy it.
- Everything decreasing – It is quite possible that this may happen to your business, it’s likely that it will be something impacting your whole industry, but you need to look to minimize this as much as you can. The key thing is not to panic, be objective, analyze, and create a strategy to bounce back.
- Everything increasing – You’re winning, sit back, and enjoy. Seriously, if this is happening you may be entering the territory of having to work out if your business can cope with increased demand and you may need to scale back if you cannot.
It is worth digging into your Google Search Console data and your Search Query Reports in any paid advertising you are doing to see if there are any changes in the amount of brand and non-brand traffic your site is seeing. It might be that generic traffic is declining due to less search interest, but if you have been building a strong brand you see consistency here. It is important to understand the difference here.
It would also be worth looking at new channels you could utilize to bridge the gap. For instance, if you find your Google Ads are not getting as much visibility and you have the budget available maybe it is a good time to try some paid social activity. Or it could even be worthwhile spending your time creating compelling email campaigns and hitting your audience this way.
2. Update website messaging
It is important that you show your website visitors, be they current customers or future prospects, that you understand the current environment and the challenge it presents to their business.
Likewise, you need to show them that your business is prepared, functioning correctly, and can still provide your products or services throughout this pandemic.
Further still, if your business is in a position that means your services are now more important, or you have new services that could offer more value to prospects then it is important that people know about them.
