Most of us can’t go an hour or two without hearing updated news about the coronavirus. Every individual and every industry has been impacted since the coronavirus started spreading rapidly all around the globe. In statistics released by The New York Times on March 15, 2020, more than 167,700 people have been affected by COVID-19 all around the world.
When it comes to businesses other than those that sell daily essentials such as grocery stores, physical stores and physical services have hit a noticeable reduction in the number of customers they are seeing on a daily basis. With the World Health Organization (WHO) advising people against going out to places where there is a gathering of people, most are afraid to even step out of their houses, let alone venture out to go shopping or dining in a restaurant.
As consumers are becoming more cautious than ever about coming in contact with other people, the digital world is getting busier than ever. A lot of industries are registering a massive decrease in sales, but with the right digital marketing strategy, you can make the best of a terrible situation.
What Can You Do to Sustain or Increase Your Sales?
At YellowFin Digital, we have unique online strategies planned that can help businesses during these crucial times. You can contact us at 361-844-8550 to discuss implementing innovative digital marketing campaigns and saving your sales from declining during the coronavirus outbreak.
In this blog, we will have a look at how you can make use of this time and use smart digital marketing to increase sales.
Businesses Offering Physical Products Can Convert to Door Deliveries
There is a huge potential for companies that can offer door delivery to make use of digital opportunities. Even if you have a physical store, you can add door delivery services for your products by taking orders online or from phone calls. As more and more employees are staying connected to work online from the comforts of their home, you can leverage this behaviour to market your products.
Yes, some people are cautious ordering food online or buying groceries through store websites or apps, but eventually, they will realize the option of coming into contact with a single delivery person is preferential to coming into contact with everyone in a restaurant or grocery store.
Adopt High Standards of Cleanliness and Reassure People
With the outbreak of coronavirus and uncertainties about how far it has spread, people are cautious and some are even close to being paranoid. We cannot blame anyone as the number of cases of coronavirus is increasing at a rapid scale from 0 on January 22 to more than 160,000 on March 7.
The average level of cleanliness is no longer acceptable and you will need to adopt highly advanced, detailed and careful cleaning habits that are proven to wash out the coronavirus. It’s not enough to include high standards of cleaning procedures. You will also want to communicate to your customers about the steps you are taking to ensure cleanliness.
Reassure your customers about the cleanliness and safety of the items you deliver. Take them through the process of cleaning and the cleaning chemicals you use to neutralize all the products.
You can let people know about all these practices through email marketing. Already, a lot of businesses have started sending emails to customers about the safety practices they are adopting to battle the spread of coronavirus. It’s also a good idea to make a video showing your customers the steps you are taking to help protect them.
This will give you a competitive edge and will increase the level of trust people have in your business.
Understand and Market According to the Shifts in Customer Behavior
The analysis and reports of customer behavior created three months ago is of no use right now. There is a significant shift in the needs of the public and your business has to roll with the changes. Your ads of luxury and discounts will be secondary to the main priority of your customers – safety.
If you are already selling cleaning products, masks and other similar stuff, then your sales will be on a definite high. Create targeted ads to your customers promoting fast delivery such as one or two-day delivery options for such items.
If you are selling other products or services, then safety and comfort should be the main mantra of your current digital marketing campaigns. People are proactively stocking up on a lot of household essentials and it’s time to offer these items safely to their doorstep. Understand the priority that your target demographic wants and needs, then design your marketing strategies accordingly.
Maximize the Marketing of Your Online Services
Recently, most of the events, conferences, seminars and product releases of the global giants like Google, Intel and Informa have been cancelled. Instead, some of these have been converted from localized events to online events.
Similarly, if you are providing any services like teaching, consultations, meditation sessions, etc., this is the time to make use of online platforms available to manage these sessions virtually.
Similarly, if you conduct yoga classes at any physical locations, you can easily set up live online sessions for your existing customers and promote it all over the world to include new customers. With people restricting themselves to their homes, such online classes will be a welcome change.
5 Digital Marketing Tips Relevant to the Times of Coronavirus
The digital marketing strategies that you were using earlier won’t necessarily be relevant to your current scenario. You need to revisit and revise your current online marketing strategies and define new guidelines to make it successful. Here are a few tips for your digital marketing endeavours.
1. Be Sensitive About the Current Situation
One common rule for creating the content that we generally use is to keep it casual and engaging. But, currently, keeping your ads casual or even worse, funny, is going to potentially backfire on you. So, it’s time to be serious and sensitive in your marketing campaigns.
Talk more about how everyone is being affected by the coronavirus and how your services can genuinely help them through these tough times. Be understanding and connect with the plight of the public in all forums.
2. Create Value-Adding Images and Videos
Dr James McQuivey took several video parameters into consideration to find out that a 1-minute video is worth 1.8 million words! With the value a video holds, it’s the best way to communicate directly with consumers, address their apprehensions and touch the right chord.
There are only two kinds of videos and images the consumers are interested in during this time of the coronavirus: educational content and content on your business-specific approach to safeguarding consumers through defined practices.
An image is worth more than a thousand words. Therefore create pictures, videos and GIFs about educating people about staying safe and about the added safety principles and practices you have included to help your customers stay safe. Instead of creating promotional content, focus on giving something back to the customers in the form of educational videos, exclusive talks by medical experts, etc. This will give them a higher level of security in buying products from your company.
3. Keep Chats Channels Open for Any Questions
People will have a lot of doubts and questions about safety and cleanliness before they purchase from you. Therefore, keep your phone lines open and chats on the website ready to provide satisfactory answers.
If you have wired chatbots to give generalized answers, it’s time to update these. Include personal conversations and try to interact with customers directly without the chatbots for better responses.
4. Long Emails Are In
If you see the above chart, it’s clear that more than 50% of emails had a word length of fewer than 300 emails. Previously, lengthy emails were considered boring and were even proven to bring down the clickthrough rate. However, right now, that’s not the case.
If the email is important enough and has details about how you can help them during hard times, people will be willing to spend 5 minutes or more to read your emails.
When writing such emails, avoid the fillers and ensure that every sentence in the email matters. Include images and videos to add effectiveness to the content of the email and make sure to have a serious and to-the-point subject line.
As a business, you should definitely send out an email to everyone on your mailing list about the precautions and procedures you are adopting to protect your customers.
5. Have Q&A Sessions to Clear Consumer Doubts
It’s better to get everything out in the open and let people ask the questions they have in mind. You can have Q&A sessions on Instagram stories, through tweets, Facebook statuses and through other social media forums too.
Let your followers ask any doubt clouding their mind about your safety protocols and clear them all out. Make them understand the high standard practices you follow to go out of your way to ensure that everything from your side is corona-free.
You can further brainstorm and create more interesting digital marketing strategies to combat these hard times by helping customers and let them help back by sustaining your business.
